Frank van Laerhoven is speaking with Maurice Paulissen.
Is it a historian? Is it an ecologist? No, it is a landscape historian! Maurice is one of the many commons scholars that cannot be easily categorized by means of a disciplinary label. He is also an exponent of a long tradition within our domain of researchers for whom “going to the field” means “going to an archive” and that manage to reconstruct commons governance 500 or more years back.
Maurice co-authored an IJC publication entitled ‘Dire Necessity or Mere Opportunity? Recurrent Peat Commercialisation from Raised Bog Commons in the Early Modern Low Countries’ together with Roy van Beek, Serge Nekrassoff, Edward Huijbens, and Theo Spek.
The episode starts with an half-hearted attempt to pin down Maurice in terms of academic disciplines (an attempt that partly fails). It then continues with a reflection on the article that served as an excuse for the conversation. That article contests the simplistic notion that in early modern Europe, shared resource management solutions offered by markets or governments were not sufficiently reliable, and therefore fell into the lap of autonomous communities. It is convincingly shown that markets (both local and regional), governments (at various levels, in various forms) and more or less autonomous communities play competing and complementary roles in the governance of peat land – roles that vary over time and place. The conversation ends with a reflection on whether a study of commons governance 500 years ago can be useful for commoners, today.
For more analyses of historical commons, also check out the following IJC titles:
FFM #4: Fisheries consulting with Andrew Johnson
126: Common Boundaries: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Property with Michael Cox and colleagues
125: Boundary spanning with Stephen Posner
124: Social capital and community resilience with Daniel Aldrich
123: Co-production and creativity with Josie Chambers
FFM #3: Mapping coastal fisheries with Paige Roberts
122: Decolonizing Conservation with Mathew Mabele
FFM #2: Reality-based fisheries policy with Bubba Cook
121: An end-of-year pod with the editors of the International Journal of the Commons
120: Land use, agriculture and the anthropocene with Billie Turner II
119: The Duty to Consult with Victoria A. Bikowski
FFM #1: Ocean policy with Elizabeth Mendenhall
118: Using games to teach about collective action and the commons with Eric Klopfer
Insight Episode #54: Dan Holland
Insight Episode #53: Dan Brockington on the myth of fortress conservation
Science and Practice #13: Land Conservation with Peter Stein
117: Coral reefs and collaborative science with Joshua Cinner
Insight Episode #52: Erin O’Donnell on the rights of nature
Insight Episode #51: Kaitlin Cordes on coffee and commodity chains
116: Stewardship salons and social science in the US Forest Service with Lindsay Campbell
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