From Private to Common: Coevolution of Land-Use Practices and Property Rights

In the concluding chapter, we synthesize the results and discuss how changing land-use regimes among Sami in interior northwest Fennoscandia interrelated with the development of property rights between 1550 and 1780. During this period, a new tenure system, reindeer pastoralism, developed. For households that had amassed large reindeer herds, it became crucial to access both large pastures in the mountains and in the boreal forest to have enough grazing. This led to the establishment of common-property regimes in both the mountains and the boreal forest, where grazing became a CPR. The emergence of this kind of common-property regime is best described as a bottom-up process as it assumes that local users design and implement institutions for common use that all or most users adhere to.

New lamps for old?

The Editors of Focaal asked me to comment on the recent award of a so-called Nobel Prize in economic sciences to Oliver Williamson, a founder of New Institutional Economics (NIE), and Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist who is best known for her work on “common property regimes” and “public entrepreneurs.” The committee of the Bank of Sweden commended the two of them for their work on “economic governance,” which has reshaped how economists think about the nature of the firm and the boundaries between private and public institutions.