Taking sanctioning seriously
The impact of sanctions on the resilience of historical commons in Europe
Tine De Moor ( Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam)
Mike Farjam (Linnaeus University)
René van Weeren (Universiteit Utrecht)
Giangiacomo Bravo (Linnaeus University)
Anders Forsman (Linnaeus University)
Amineh Ghorbani (TU Delft - Energy and Industry)
Molood Ale Ebrahim Dehkordi (TU Delft - Energy and Industry)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
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.
help_outline