Emergence of Endogenous Legal Institutions: Property Rights and Community Governance In The Italian Alps

The article Erik and I discussed involved the “Emergence of Endogenous Legal Institutions: Property Rights and Community Governance in the Italian Alps” which deals with the enforcement of charters in the 13th-19th centuries. One of the main topics covered were lock-in mechanisms, which include trading ones membership rights to a common land and living in a charter for a set time. The reason for why these are in place has to deal with charters having a limited availability of resources and to prevent free riders. For example when we visited the commons in Cavalese they mentioned how three years ago a new citizen to the area had to wait five years until they could join the commons, but recently they increased this to 20 years and the idea of increasing it to 80 years has been suggested. 

Some ways that these charters were enforced included looking at the physical stock, which is simply looking at a resource and seeing if there are any missing. Today in Cavalese they have rangers who are responsible for checking everything from trees to mushrooms. Another way charters were enforced was through monitoring others actions. Around the 15th century peasants used monitoring as a way to protect their wine vineyards from thieves, which was ineffective because this caused them to set time periods in which people were allowed to harvest in order to make monitoring each other easier. 

Factors that caused these charters to pop up are remoteness which is essentially explaining that since there are not as many routes it is a lot easier to see if anyone is stealing. Another factor is population due to the larger the group the higher the cost of coordination on informal punishment, so communities with larger populations are more likely to increase their efficiency by adopting a charter versus a small community. There is a minimum size community that a charter becomes preferable because of the fixed costs that are involved with setting up a charter. Lastly, there is contagion which says if a charter starts in the town next to you, then your town is more likely to adopt a charter too.

The Italian alps with Cavalese.