Governed nature. An ecological, institutional and cultural approach to community resource management (13th – 21st centuries)
Summary
Community resource management has continued to attract the attention of historians and social scientists. This research project gives continuity to current lines of work, pointing towards new challenges, but always with a determined will to dialogue on a double plane: firstly, establishing a dialogue between history and the other sciences, by addressing concerns common and the testing of different concepts, approaches and methodologies; secondly, betting on internationalization when formulating questions and presenting and discussing the results. Thus, multidisciplinarity and internationalization are the features that define this project. It seeks to deepen the analysis of the environmental and social consequences of community resource management, making an eclectic use of contributions of the two main streams of analysis of community resources: The New Institutional Economy and the Moral Economy/Ecology. The research effort is posed in four directions. In the first place, the analysis of the determinants of cooperation in simple and complex communal systems, with special attention to the latter, since it relies on making substantive contributions from historical analysis to the understanding of nested and polycentric institutional systems. Secondly, it is about understanding the processes of change making use of the concept of institutional bricolage, in the sense of practices that allow local groups to respond to the conflicts posed by internal dynamics and the pressure of forces. Thirdly, an inquiry into the relationships between communal communities and inequality is proposed, through the reconstruction of accounting balances that not only take into account the distribution of resources in terms of income but also the physical flows of energy and materials. Finally, it seeks to reinterpret the processes of social change with the help of the concept of imagined communal, as a fourth dimension to be added to the Ostrom triad (CPR, CPrR, CPI), in the belief that the mental and cultural representations can contribute to a better understanding of political opportunities (agrarian reform, transition) or to the construction of a new socio-environmental and democratic ethic in post-colonial contexts.
Research team
Óscar Bascuñán Añover (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia (NTNU, Norway)
Miguel Ángel Bringas Gutiérrez (Universidad de Cantabria)
Ana Cabana Iglesia (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)
Romina de Carli (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
José Miguel Gastón Aguas (Universidad Pública de Navarra)
José Miguel Lana Berasain (Universidad Pública de Navarra)
Emilio Majuelo Gil (Universidad Pública de Navarra)
Juan Madariaga Orbea (Universidad Pública de Navarra)
Francisco J. Medina Albaladejo
Antonio Ortega Santos (Universidad de Granada)
José Antonio Serrano Álvarez (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)