Institutions, sanctioning processes and the management of commons. A field-based analysis of the monitoring, controlling and sanctioning instruments in the communal villages’ Obște

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present an Institutional overview of the Romanian communal village form of property known as Obste and of the difference between “the old” and “the new” Obște. The Obste is the entity which manages the commons held by the villagers in a communal form of property. Usually, the commons managed by the Obste consist of forests, pastures and common infrastructure (markets, schools, ballrooms or even the public lighting system in some cases). The type of commons over which the Obste has a major impact is the forest, because the incentives to exploit it in order to increase the total revenue are much more pressing. The analysis will be based on the institutional analysis and development framework. The analysis will be cross-temporal in the sense that all the communal villages will be analyzed over three time periods: the old Obste (the period until 1948) –, the communist period (1948-1989, when all the communal properties were transferred to state’s property) and the new Obste (1990 – present; a significant moment in this third period was the enforcement of a new law in 2000, which opened the opportunity to re-establish the communal village’s Obste). The focus of the paper will be on the effects of the monitoring and sanctioning instruments in the three periods mentioned above and on how their changes affected the CPRs institutions' robustness levels.