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In the early modern period, much rule-making took place on the local level, also within institutions for collective action such as commons. The term ‘commons’ stood for both a wide range of natural resources and for the institution itself, which was characterised by self-governance and self-regulation. Recent literature on the regulation of collective resources puts much emphasis on the role of sanctioning in order to prevent freeriding among those who are entitled to use the commons, and by those who have no rights but try to benefit. Another branch of the literature searches for the ‘holy grail’ of institutional success and tries to find out which ‘recipe’ works best for making commons sufficiently resilient to changes (e. g. population growth, economic crises, ecological change). The detailed study of eight Dutch commons of varying longevity in this article brings together, for the first time, both debates within a historical framework. Our study demonstrates that the longer an institution survived, the less energy its rule-makers spent on creating sanctions. Contrary to our expectations, not all rules were accompanied by a sanction. Moreover, the type of sanctioning changed over time according to a specific pattern. Some types of sanctions were only used in extreme cases, when nothing else worked. This article provides a much deeper understanding of how freeriding could be dealt with in an institution for collective action in order to ensure its survival., Rural History Yearbook, Bd. 12 (2015): Ländliche Gemeingüter. Kollektive Ressourcennutzung in der europäischen Agrarwirtschaft

Parallel to current social, economic, and ecological crises, new institutions for collective action are rapidly developing. In domains where the government withdraws and the market fails, citizen collectives in care, energy, infrastructure, and other areas offer accessible and affordable alternatives at the local level. This chapter explains, through a thousand years of history, what institutions for collective action are, and which factors influence how they function. It analyzes how current developments differ from earlier waves in the development of institutions for collective action. Just like today, periods of growth for this type of institutions were preceded by periods of accelerated development of the free market. These institutions constitute a correction mechanism and can play an important role in society as a third governance model, alongside market and state, although the potential of the commons as a governance model for global resources remains disputed.

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 high-resolution 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.

Common-pool resources (CPR) are shared resources that can be at the risk of depletion as a result of over-use [1]. To avoid the Tragedy of the commons, users can build institutions for collective action, i.e., systems of rules and enforcement mechanisms that allow for collective management and use of those resources [2]. In other words, such institutions are the collection of rules-in-use that emerge as a result of collective decision making of entitled users [3]. The cooperation among the members of an institution for collective action can enable the sustainable governance of resources. However, these members are heterogeneous in different way, possibly affecting their level of cooperation. In commons literature, heterogeneity is defined as diversity in wealth, power, cast, preferences, income among commoners [4, 5].While theoretical research suggests that inequality can have a positive influence on collective action [6], some empirical studies have highlighted the...