Society is facing urgent crises, such as climate change and housing shortages, which increase feelings of uncertainty and distrust towards the government. Many citizens feel powerless and feel a loss of control over their living environment. At the same time, we see a growing movement of self-organisation, in which citizen collectives take responsibility for local challenges in areas such as energy, healthcare and housing. Citizen collectives offer unique solutions through their focus on shared values, sustainability and decentralised decision-making. However, cooperation with governments is often difficult, due to differences in goals and working methods, because the specific institutional logic is not recognised. They are considered ‘hybrid’ organisations, somewhere between market and government, but are neither one nor the other. This article investigates how citizen collectives and governments can collaborate more effectively when this institutional logic and the roles that citizen collectives can play are better known. It also discusses the conditions that are needed to make these initiatives more inclusive and representative. The aim is to harness the power of citizen collectives for necessary societal transitions and the restoration of trust in democratic processes.

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 highresolution 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.

Historical data are valuable resources for providing insights into general sociological patterns in the past. How-ever, these data often inform us at the macro-level of analysis but not about the role of individuals’ behaviours in the emergence of long-term patterns. Therefore, it is difficult to infer ‘how’ and ‘why’ certain patterns emerged in the past. Historians use various methods to draw hypotheses about the underlying reasons for emerging patterns and trends, but since the patterns are the results of hundreds if not thousands of years of human behaviour, these hypotheses can never be tested in reality. Our proposition is that simulation models and specifically, agent-based models (ABMs) can be used as complementary tools in historical studies to support hypothesis building. The approach that we propose and test in this paper is to design and configure models in such a way as to generate historical patterns, consequently aiming to find individual-level explanations for the emerging pattern. In this work, we use an existing, empirically validated, agent-based model of common pool resource management to test hypotheses formulated based on a historical dataset. We first investigate whether the model can replicate various patterns observed in the dataset, and second, whether it can contribute to a better understanding of the underlying mechanism that led to the observed empirical trends. We showcase how ABM can be used as a complementary tool to support theory development in historical studies. Finally, we provide some guidelines for using ABM as a tool to test historical hypotheses.

In their studies of collective exploitation of common-pool resources, Ostrom and other scholars have stressed the importance of sanctioning as an essential method for preventing overuse and, eventually, the collapse of commons. However, most of the available evidence is based on data covering a relatively small period in history, and thus does not inform us about the evolution of rules, including sanctions, over time. In this article, we demonstrate, based on historical sources covering several centuries, that sanctioning was not always the preferred way of preventing or dealing with free-riding in institutions for collective action, but that the legal context is decisive to understand why commoners in some countries were using more sanctions than those in others to regulate commoners' behavior. Commoners that could self-govern their resources used fewer sanctions, and when they did, it was mainly to avoid overuse of their most vulnerable resources. Moreover, graduated sanctioning seems to be less important than suggested in Ostrom's famous Design Principles, and was reserved primarily for immediate threats to the commons' resources. We also show the importance of other types of rules, such as differentiated rules, which have hardly been taken into account in literature to date.

Historical commons represent self-governed governance regimes that regulate the use and management of natural and man-made shared resources. Despite growing scientific interests, analyses of commons evolution and temporal dynamics are rare and drivers of change (birth, adaptation, dissolution) remain obscure. We apply an interdisciplinary approach and address these issues from an eco-evolutionary perspective. Analyses of > 400 Dutch commons over more than a millennium (between the 9th and the 20th century) uncovered that most commons originated between 1200 and 1700, and that there was a particularly high rate of evolution during 1300-1550, a pattern intermediate to gradualism and punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution. Dissolutions of commons were rare prior to 1800 and peaked around 1850, comparable to a mass extinction in biology. Temporal trends in number, spatial distribution, density, and dispersion of historical commons were distinctive and resembled developments seen at the levels of species and individuals in the growth of biological communities and populations, in that they showed signs of saturation determined by the abundance and distribution of resources. The spatiotemporal dynamics of commons also pointed to important roles of social, economic and political factors, such as new reclamations of resources and pressure on resources due to population growth. Despite internal and external pressures, the self-governing commons studied here were very successful, in the sense that they persisted for on average >350 years. There was a weak positive relationship between the use of multiple resources and the lifespan of commons, resembling associations between diversity and persistence seen in biological systems. It is argued that eco-evolutionary perspectives can further the understanding of the long-term dynamics of commons as institutions for collective action, vitalize future research, improve management of shared goods, and advise about sustainable utilization of finite resources.

We present an analysis of regulatory activities in historical commons offering a unique picture of their long-term institutional dynamics. The analysis took into account almost 3,800 regulatory activities in eighteen European commons in two countries across seven centuries. Despite differences in time and space, we found a shared pattern where an initial, highly-dynamic institutional-definition phase was followed by a relatively long period of stability and a final burst of activities, possibly in an attempt to respond to new challenges. In addition, most of the initial regulatory activities focused on resource use, while towards the end other activities prevailed. Our approach allows for a better understanding of institutional dynamics and our findings also provide important insights about how to regulate the use of current natural resources.