http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9528-9027
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Abstract
Using the case of forest and pasture commons in the Carpathian Mountains, this paper examines the emotional work carried out in institutions, in creating and changing rules, accessing resources, in leadership and contestation processes. The recent restitution of land commons in Romania has created possibilities for participation in the field of relations that shape environments and governance. This paper brings empirical research, based on extensive fieldwork, to showcase disputes over grazing areas, allegations of deforestation and ecological neglect. The ethnographic approach helps reveal the intricate processes by which actors create, experience and rework institutions bottom-up. This paper argues for an enlivened approach to institutions as complex, emergent and relational entities. Using the lens of a relational-vitalist ontology, it emphasizes the depth and subtlety of activities carried out by people that bring forth institutions, and draws attention to the interconnectedness of productive, political and emotional labour.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the editors of the special issue, Raoul Beunen and James Patterson, for thoughtful engagement with the paper, and to Irina Velicu and the two anonymous reviewers for inspired suggestions. I am also grateful to my interviewees from the Southern Carpathians, especially to my informants from Titești, who allowed me to gain insights into their worlds-in-the-making. Warm gratitude to my fieldwork and project comrades, Ștefan Voicu, George Iordăchescu and Irina Opincaru; to Arryn Snowball for being an involved discussion partner and a critical editor.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 According to official sources, data compiled and obtained from Forestry Guard Inspectorate, 2016.
2 Commons organized on the same principles existed, and still exist today also in the other parts of the Carpathians, notably in the region of Transylvania that was to become part of Romania after 1918, in which the commons called composessorate and urbarial associations functioned, as they did across other areas ruled previously by the Austro-Hungarian state, such as Slovakia (the urbars treated in (Kluvánková-Oravská Citation2011; Sulek Citation2006) and Slovenia (Bogataj and Krč Citation2014; Premrl et al. Citation2015; Gatto and Bogataj Citation2015).
3 The common forests are usually a mixture of low-level stands made of beech trees, used as firewood, and coniferous species of commercial value; some are spruce plantations, some are natural forests.
4 The management plan is a large work, of more than 200 pages, containing tables and maps, stating annual harvesting quotas and types of cutting, according to scientific forestry conceptions. It is developed by private companies, accredited by the state. To acquire the plans is very costly and especially burdensome for small commons.
5 In other areas, larger sums of the commons revenues go towards community investments, such as 50% in Vrancea region, Southeastern Carpathians, or up to 20% in the county of Harghita and Covasna, inside the region of Transylvania.
6 Sometimes commoners with larger shares can receive between 2,500 and 3,000 euro/year of more from commons dividends, if the common forest has high commercial value and large subsidies are received for pastures. However, this is usually the case with only one or two people in a commons.
7 Findings from my survey show that 30% of the interviewed presidents work or used to work in forestry; another 30% are engineers in other professional fields, such as mining or energy, and around 25% are manual laborers or farmers.
8 Locally, people make a distinction between sheep owners, called oieri, and the shepherds, the hired hands, called ciobani. The sheepowners and the shepherds often work together; however the owners do mostly other kinds of work, they make the cheese, organize the sheepfold, while the shepherds go out with the sheep on the pasture. There is a marked hierarchical relationship between the owner and the shepherd, also a difference in public perception, the owners being respected as well-to-do managers of herds, while the hired shepherds are considered mere ruffians with poor wit, who cannot do any other job. Yet, the positions and perception of the two often also intermingle, and in local language, both the owners and the hired are called shortly ciobani, shepherds, implying a type of occupation, of work. I mostly use the word shepherds in the paper, although I mostly refer to sheep owners.
9 Profitable in the area means that a family can afford to improve their house, to buy a car and eventually build a house for one or two sons.
10 Regarding how subsidy money should be spent, ambiguity looms large in many cases across the country that I have examined, a dispute between those who consider that the subsidy should be received by those who actually use the pasture, i.e. the stock owners, the shepherds, which is how the subsidy is intended; yet others consider that the owner of the land, i.e. the obște a.k.a. the commoners, is entitled to receive the subsidy, and that the “grazing sheep eat the rights of other commoners”, so there should be some form of compensation. Some members see the solution in the stock owners being paid the subsidy, and having to pay a larger rent sum to the owners, i.e. the obște; yet, the fear runs in the background that once they receive the subsidy money, the stock owners will not pay the due amounts towards the obște, as contracts are not seen as tight enough, and the shepherds as too belligerent.
11 The old bylaws first took shape initially in 1910, when a model bylaw was given by the state.
12 57% (25 commons in the southern counties) have never modified their bylaws since 2000, although 45% consider them to be totally outdated.
13 The right is inheritable and attached to the person, no matter where the person lives or was born; because of urbanization and emigration trends, many of the members no longer reside in the area with the common land, which makes it difficult to have a quorum.
14 According to my survey, in the southern areas, the average number of participants at commons’ general assemblies is 38%. Because of the inheritance system, most of the current participants are elders, and men largely dominate (refer to Table 2 for more detail).
15 20% of the southern commons give every member one vote, regardless of their number of shares. This system allows for equality, and monopolies are avoided. Most commons, 42%, vote according to the number of shares. In 36% the voting is a function of shares, but capped, so that monopolies are avoided. In Titești, everyone votes according to the shares, 1 vote for 5 shares, with a cap at 300 votes, which means that nobody can have more than approximately 5% of the votes.
16 Based on his long-term lived experiences, there are nuances in Ionel’s perceptions of the ‘elite’ in power: the president is not that much to blame; he sees Gigi more as a victim, a kind of scapegoat for the other members of the council, the more venal ones.
17 Local logging companies usually negotiate with the obște and buy standing timber, which they log and sell on to large scale timber companies in the country. They also agree on the price for extracting the firewood needed to distribute to commoners. Local families who own horses and carts also harvest small quantities illicitly, but with the knowledge and acceptance of the board.
18 Somehow, the aggressive practices of shepherds extend the common, beyond the current formal borders - which are the borders of the ‘property’; by disregarding formal understandings of ownership rights, the shepherds aggregate all the available grassland in a common that can be ‘eaten’, creating discrete counter-hegemonic spaces, where historical processes of ever expanding enclosure become reversed. Similar processes have been commonly described as the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin Citation1968), from a liberal perspective of property rights. Yet, through the ever-expanding process of enclosure and formalization of land rights, areas where large stretches of land are considered open, have become utterly scarce in Europe. Similarly, recent explorations point to practices in which locals put forward understandings of the commons that are different from bounded formalized rights, as in the example of reindeer herding in Norway examined by Marin and Bjørklund (Citation2015).