Common property management in Cavalese: Formal or informal?

Hello! I'm going to be backtracking a few days to Cavalese and the common property forest. On January 8^th we were in Cavalese, a small town in Trento that is part of the community that manages a common property forest that has been in common ownership and use since the twelfth century. The article Hayden and I presented is called “Who needs formal regulations to manage the commons? The rural charters in Northern Italy.” This article examines the advantages and disadvantages of formal and informal regulations to manage common property and avoid the tragedy of the commons with special examination of the Trentino area.

            The author of the article states that the tragedy of the commons to be avoided, the residents with a stake in the common property have to have repeated interaction and protection from outsiders. This means that the insiders needed to know that they would be returning to use the resource each year as an incentive follow regulations so that the resource would be there not only for the community the next year but for themselves, and that outsiders are sufficiently excluded so that free-riding does not occur. The article examines whether communities use formal or informal regulations to meet these conditions and reflects on efficiency of both methods.

            Smaller communities can manage the commons through the townspeople monitoring each other without the need of formal regulations. These small communities without regulation rely on social punishments for those who misuse the commons such as the refusal of a marriage or business deal. Preventing outsiders for using the commons was easier in isolated areas but more of a problem in larger, easier to access communities. Larger communities rely on formal laws, regulations, monitoring, and punishment to prevent outsider use and insider misuse. Larger communities also have a more difficult time managing the commons because of the number of people involved and may rely on partitioning. Larger communities may have more efficient monitoring of the property, but they also face larger costs to distinguish property lines and hire patrols to prevent misuse.

            The Magnifica comunità di Fiemme manages the commons in Trentino that largely consists of forests and some grazing land. The land is manages by 11 representatives, one from each municipality in the region, and is largely used for logging. This community relies on formal regulation to manage the commons with hired rangers to prevent misuse. The community permits logging of about 80% of the annual growth of the forest so that re-growth can occur. We discussed how this large community has managed to not partition the large commons among the eleven towns; the prevailing theory is that by running the commons in a democratic republic model, the community has lessened the communication issues that a large community managing a commons might normally experience.

            While in Cavalese we visited the palace of the Magnifica comunità di Fiemme as well as the sawmill where the trees from the common property are processed.

The saw mill in Cavalese where the logs from the common property is processed.

From the top of the ski lifts with Cavalese in the background.