Call for papers Rural History Conference Bern, deadline March 31, 2013
Call for papers for the Rural History Conference in Bern, August 2013
*Ruling the commons*
Tine De Moor (Utrecht University) and Guido Alfani (Bocconi University) organize two sessions at Rural History Conference in Bern, 19-22 August 2013 on the topic of commons’ regulation and related issues. Rural History 2013 is the first conference held under the auspices of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO). It is organized by the Swiss Rural History Society
(SRHS) and the Archives of Rural History (ARH) in Bern. The main aim of the conference is to provide an overview of the state of the art of rural history today. Another goal is to strengthen the existing networks and co-operation of rural historians and their institutions. The conference will be an excellent occasion for historians to discuss the basic question of what exactly rural history is, how it can be narrated and, crucial for the future development of rural history, how the attractions of rural history in an era of worldwide urbanization can be communicated to the younger generation.
The conference is structured around panel sessions. The panels so far accepted by the scientific committee are now published on the website of the conference (www.ruralhistory2013.org). Scholars are invited to submit their proposals for individual contributions directly to the organizer of the panel in which they would like to participate actively. It is then up to the panel organizer to decide whether she/he can accept your proposal or not. The deadline for submitting individual proposals to the panel organizers is 15 February 2013.
Paper proposals for the “Ruling the commons”-sessions should be sent directly to collective-action@uu.nl. Authors will be notified about their selection before the 31st of March 2013.
*Description of the sessions*
Commons are again a hot topic, in particular in scientific disciplines other than history. Whereas since the late 1960s they were perceived from a negative point of view, this perception seems to have changed recently, due to the work of Ostrom (Nobel Prize in 2009) and due to the economic and social crisis, which enforces the call for new models of governance, other than market and state-based models. The input of historiographical knowledge in the debate is still limited but nevertheless very important as only the study of the long-term evolution of institutions for collective action such as commons can help us to understand why they might be viable, and more resilient, alternatives to other forms of resource governance. The two sessions we propose for this conference, we will focus mainly on the way in which commons were internally organized and how the commoners adapted their institution to the changing circumstances. Two misunderstandings that are still alive in some parts of the social sciences are the supposed lack of internal organization and the idea that commons are accessible to all, as in open access would be the case. These two issues will form the focus of our two sub-sessions which will be chaired by the organisors. In three of the underneath listed papers, the internal organization in particular in the form of regulation will receive special attention, and this for different countries in Europe and periods since the late middle ages. Several of the presented papers use a new methodology that is currently being developed as part of an international project (Utrecht-Pamplona-Lancaster) whereby for a substantial number of cases the regulation of commons is analysed and compared over time according to a collectively set-up analysis framework.
Related to the issue of access to the commons, several papers will focus on the ways resources were divided within the commons and how inequality influenced the functioning of the commons. In fact, only rarely were rights over the commons equally distributed among all the households or al the individuals of a community. Instead, different categories with unequal access could exist, or the community could be split between those who enjoyed the rights to the common resources, and those who did not. These distinctions created conflict within the community and generated specific issues of governance and control. Sometimes, unequal rights were one of the reasons leading to the progressive erosion of the commons, or even to their final disappearance.
For additional papers we would welcome in particular papers that address the following issues:
• Access: Who was entitled to access the common? How membership changed over time in response to what sort of factors? In particular, how did migration processes generate over time increasing inequality in access to the common resources?
• Use: Which resources were extracted? Was use restriction based on quotas or fees? Is it possible to observe a change in the sort of restriction mechanisms over time?
• Governance: Which governance levels can be observed in the common? What was the degree of local participation in each of them? How did they change over time?
• Monitoring: How monitoring activities and mechanisms were arranged?
• Sanctioning: Which combination of sanctions was used? Was graduated sanctioning in place?
• Conflict Settlement: Were conflict settlement mechanisms used? Who was entitled to make use of them? More generally, was greater inequality in accessing the commons always connected to more intense conflict, and did this process require the use of specific settlement mechanisms?
Presenters and papers that have been accepted so far:
• Matteo Di Tullio (Bocconi University, Milan, Italy) - Commons and Inequality in Lombardy, fifteenth-seventeenth centuries
• Luca Mocarelli (Bicocca University, Milan, Italy) - Commons in unequal
societies: alpine Lombardy in the eighteenth century
• Luigi Lorenzetti (Università della Svizzera italiana, Mendrisio,
Switzerland) - title to be confirmed
• Tine De Moor (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) - The exclosure of the commoners? Evolution of access rules on the Dutch Markegenootschappen in the early modern period
• José Miguel Lana Berasain (Public University of Navarre, Pamplona,
Spain) and Miguel Laborda Péman (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) - Village Federations. Institutional diversity and polycentric governance in northern Spain (Navarre, 14th-20th centuries)
• Gabriela Landolt (University of Bern, Switzerland) - Who, when, how and how much: The transformation of common property rights in alpine farming in early modern and modern times
[Cross-posted, with thanks, from EH Net]