From public ownership back to commons

Abstract

This chapter is an analysis of the forest commons in Romania (in Romanian - „obște”, „composesorat”) as social solidarity economy organisations mainly looking at how the collective production of norms in these new (re-instituted after 50 years) organisations impacts the sustainability concerns in the collective management of natural goods and production of new goods and services of interest to the community. The chapter has four parts: the first part is offering to the readers a conceptual framework of common goods in order to better understand the particular situation of Romanian natural resources (forests, pastures) as common goods and their transition from public management to commons across time; the second part is a brief history of commons in Romania covering evolutions from 1948 to 2012 and including estimates of the size of surfaces they manage; the third part studies the commons as social economy organisations using key social and economic indicators of commons as SSE organisations from the Prometeus research project in which the authors were involved; and the last part assesses the disposition of the commons for a public, community interest mission and sustainable management of forests using survey data analysis. The chapter thus provides an in-depth analysis of commons as social solidarity economy organisations in Romania and of their capacity to provide a viable framework for sustainably managing the common resources under circumstances of significant economic pressure.