Search

On a daily basis we are confronted with social dilemmas, or the choice between our own short-term benefits and long-term collective benefits of societies. We often look to governments and markets to create a framework that enables us to make the choice for the latter easier, but with many grand challenges ahead of us – climate change, loss of biodiversity, mass migration, inequality, to name but a few – we will need to look beyond those and look into the possibilities citizens themselves have to contribute to solving those challenges. In the Netherlands, the social enterprise in the form of the social business has in the past often been put forward as a solution that gives citizens choices as consumers. In “Shakeholder society?” Tine De Moor brings in the perspective of the entrepreneurial citizen, and looks at the possibilities of bringing the roles of stakeholders and shareholders closer together, in cooperative social enterprises. She argues that we need to consider the full breath of social enterprises and give recognition to a diversity of players in this field, all of which brings parts of the solution to the fore. The origins and features of this particular type of social enterprise are discussed, as are the various ways in which they may provide society with the much-needed transformative power. De Moor furthermore discusses the role of scientists, governments, and citizens in increasing the resilience of the cooperative social enterprise as a transformative business model.

At the beginning of the corona crisis, there was a real wave of solidarity actions, for example people helping each other in villages and neighbourhoods, and buying food from close by. At the same time, opinion articles appeared about the historical-social context in which the COVID-19 virus could have such a rapid impact on society. These two observations have led to this research into the potential of citizen collectives in times of crisis. First, it was shown that, in combating the pandemic, governments paid little or no attention to the possibilities of citizen collectives to reach citizens in villages, districts and neighbourhoods through direct, personal channels. In contrast, the analysis of 20 opinion articles from the period March-June 2020 shows that the value shifts that most authors consider desirable to address the big issues in society are a good fit with the values that citizen collectives represent. For three domains – care and housing, work and food – this is illustrated with existing practices and new needs. Their conclusion is that the government would do well to make a strong appeal to the organizing capacity of active citizens, their networks and community strength when tackling major social challenges related to climate, energy, care, food and housing.

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., Energy & Industry

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Energy & Industry, Applied Sciences

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 per, Energy & Industry

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., Energy & Industry