From the resilience of commons to resilience through commons. The peasant way of buffering shocks and crises

• Published in: Continuity and change Vol. 37; no. 1; pp. 1 - 11
• Main Authors: Soens, Tim, De Keyzer, Maïka
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.05.2022
• Subjects: 18th century; 19th century; Climate change; Collective action; Common lands; Disasters; Empires; Environmental hazards; Farmers; Forests; Households; Irrigation; Low income groups; Nomads; Pastoralism; Peasants; Religious communities; Resilience; Rights; Rural communities; Egypt
• ISSN: 0268-4160; 1469-218X
• DOI: 10.1017/S026841602200008X

[...]it is difficult to predict the level of resilience or vulnerability of the peasantry as an overarching group to shocks and hazards. 1. [...]vice versa, commons – or more generally, institutions for collective action – can function in many different societal and environmental configurations, from nomadic pastoralists and commercial farmers to urban religious communities. [...]the nature and organisation of common access and use rights were highly variable. Communal rights in forests and coppice woodlands might have helped poor households to overcome price spikes on the market for wood and fuel, which became increasingly frequent in the eighteenth century.6 Peasant communities in Geradadda, on the boundary between the influence spheres of Venice and Milan, strategically and commercially used their communal assets such as land, mills, and canals to mitigate the shock of the French-Italian wars at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries.7 In Ottoman Egypt, the communal organisation of the irrigation and drainage of the Nile Delta proved more capable of protecting the region against environmental hazards such as salinisation, land losses, siltation of the irrigation network and evaporation of water than the more centralised management which replaced it in the early nineteenth century.8 The examples above might suggest that commons are indeed the ‘secret’ to peasant resilience, preventing hazards from turning into full-blown disasters. According to De Moor, the ‘secret’ of a well-functioning and resilient common lies above all in adaptability: the rapid detection and remediation of problems, which is facilitated by the fact that those dependent on the resource are also those who can alter the rules.11 While the resilience of commons has been widely debated in the literature, considerably less research has been devoted to the question of whether commons also increased resilience to extreme events and climatic variability, and if so, in what way, and in which conditions. [...]the question is: can we open the ‘black box’ of the commons and unravel the mechanisms through which commons generated resilience?