Abstract
Human societies and natural ecosystems are under threat by growing populations, overexploitation of natural resources and climate change. This calls for more sustainable utilization of resources based on past experiences and insights from many different disciplines. Interdisciplinary approaches to studies of historical commons have potential to identify drivers of change and keys to success in the past, and offer advice about the management and use of shared resources in contemporary and future systems. We address these issues by applying an ecological perspective to historical data on social-ecological systems. We perform comparisons and time series analyses for nine successful Dutch commons for which high-resolution data on the regulatory activities and use of shared resources is available for on average 380 years (range 236 to 568) during the period 1300 to 1972. Within commons, institutional developments were oscillating, with periods of intense regulatory activity being separated by periods of low activity, and with the dynamics of regulations being largely independent across commons. Ecological theory posits that species that occupy similar niches should show correlated responses to environmental challenges; however, commons using more similar resources did not have more parallel or similar institutional developments. One notable exception was that sanctioning was more frequent in commons that directed more regulatory activities towards non-renewable subsoil resources, whereas there was no association between sanctioning and the use of renewable resources. This might indicate that commoners were aware of potential resource depletion and attempted to influence freeriding by actively trying to solve the underlying social dilemmas. Sanctioning regulations were more frequent during the first than during the second part of a common’s life, indicating that while sanctioning might have been important for the establishment of commons it was not key to the long-term persistence of historical commons.
Highlights
A growing human population, exploitation, changes in land use, habitat fragmentation and degradation together with ongoing climate change impose severe threats to biodiversity, ecosystems and the human societies that depend on them
Characterization of the commons used for analyses of long-term institutional dynamics
Previous analyses based on a larger data set indicate that Dutch commons that used more diverse resource types had longer lifespans [15]
Summary
A growing human population, exploitation, changes in land use, habitat fragmentation and degradation together with ongoing climate change impose severe threats to biodiversity, ecosystems and the human societies that depend on them. Despite a growing scientific interest in the management of natural resources under collective governance regime [9,10,11,12,13,14], important aspects of the dynamics and drivers of long-term development of commons-institutions, often spanning several centuries, remain largely unexplored. In the study reported here, we analyze and compare patterns of long-term institutional change and resource use in self-governed medieval and early modern Dutch commons that were established for the utilization and management of shared resources (e.g., infrastructure, vegetation, animals, and subsoil resources such as peat). Commons have over the past 20 years increasingly been considered as socio-ecological systems [18], the parallels that can be drawn on a more abstract level between eco-evolutionary developments of biological populations, species, and ecosystems and those of commons as institutions are largely absent from literature [19]. Dissolutions of commons were rare prior to 1800 and peaked around 1850, comparable to a mass extinction in biology, whereas temporal trends in number and spatial distribution of commons resembled patterns of growth of biological communities and populations, showing signs of saturation determined by the abundance and distribution of resources [15]
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