José-Miguel Lana
From privatisation to governed nature
Old and new approaches to rural commons in Spain1
Introduction
For over fifty years now, rural commons have provided a constant source of interest for Spanish historians.2 Yet it is also true to say that over the course of this time there has been a significant realignment of the research programme. During the 1970s and 1980s attention was focused on the privatisation process (and in particular on what is referred to in Spain as desamortización civil, or civil disentailment) as a milestone on the road to capitalism. Since the 1990s, however, researchers have revealed a growing interest in the use and management that rural communities made of their common resources, in the environmental effects this management had, and in the conflicts arising around them (within the heart of the community itself or in response to state intervention).
This realignment is consistent with the noticeable change in tendency across the social sciences as a whole. Nineteenth-century liberalism had dismissed the commons as ‘non-property’, a sign of backwardness that was a hallmark of a primitive arrangement of social life, and which had to be replaced by private ownership and the free enterprise of individual agents. A Marxist critique was not far removed from that perspective, inasmuch as it considered the disappearance of the commons to be an inevitable condition in the successions of modes of production and, in particular, an essential condition in the process of primitive accumulation that led to capitalism. The difference is that while the liberal interpretation valued this development positively in the pursuit of efficiency, the Marxist position assessed it negatively in terms of fairness. The development of the social sciences during the twentieth century remained faithful to this view until the 1980s. Both those authors who defended the property rights paradigm3 and those who developed the collective action theory4 understood that communal property was incompatible with the efficient allocation of resources and economic growth due to the incentive structure it involves.
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, two lines of thinking have contributed to the intellectual reinstatement of the commons. The first of this is to be found in the field of new institutional economics (NIE), which suggests a more complex reading than the one described earlier. It could be said that the core of the analysis has shifted from the individual making decisions to the rules or incentive structures that inform individual behaviour. This was how the ‘second’ Douglas North addressed the issue by describing the institutions as ‘the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction’, in short, as ‘the rules of the game’.5 Yet Elinor Ostrom was the one who embraced a more comprehensive approach to the simultaneous redrafting of the theory of goods (with the concept of common pool resources, CPR, differentiating between those publicly and those privately owned), the theory of property rights (understood as a ‘bundle of rights’) and the theory of collective action for postulating the possibility of a third way, as opposed to the dichotomy between market and state. The key would lie in a set of rules or design principles that ensure the clarity, coherence, strength and flexibility of common institutions.6
The second line is based on the parallel notions of moral economy and moral ecology. On the one hand, there are those ‘entitlement scholars’, who defend the importance of the mechanisms of social inclusion when fostering development. By helping to mitigate inequality and poverty through access to resources, the commons would therefore contribute to social cohesion and to the self-sufficiency of local groups.7 On the other hand, there are those scholars who see the concept of social metabolism as a bridge between purely physical parameters (flows of energy and materials) and those of a social and political nature, which are understood in terms of co-evolution. Within this framework, the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ refers to a model of social reproduction that is opposed to commercial exploitation and attentive to the capability of natural resources to renew themselves.8
The following pages will provide, first, a conceptual and quantitative description of what is understood by ‘common lands’ in Spain. This is followed by a review of the studies that have focused on the privatisation process and, finally, by an examination of the main research streams pursued by those studying the use and exploitation of these commons.
Spanish rural commons: What is in a name?
What should we understand by ‘rural commons’ in the Spanish case?9 In linguistic terms, a perusal of the Spanish dictionary highlights the notion of plurality. Its 22nd edition (2001) includes the term monte público, in the singular, and defines it as ‘uncultivated land, covered mainly by trees and other plants, which belongs to the state, province or council’. However, it changes to the plural when referring to montes en mano común (described as ‘which belong to all the villagers’), or to bienes comunales, a synonym of bienes concejiles and bienes de aprovechamiento común, which the dictionary defines as ‘which belong to a municipal or other local authority and whose purpose is to be used by the local community’. The plural is also used for a term that is closely related yet differentiated, namely bienes de propios, which it defines as ‘those belonging to a municipality or minor local authority and whose purpose is not to be used by the local community but instead to generate income’.10 Assets to be used freely by the local community and assets to be used to generate income to cover council costs: These are the two types of property that tend to be described in general terms in Spain as ‘rural commons’.
Nevertheless, the boundaries between bienes de aprovechamiento común and bienes de propios have never been clearly defined. The property that local councils marketed was not so much a perfectly delimited tract of land but instead a specific use of the same. For example, a public auction could be held to rent the use of a communal plot as pastureland, whereby the grass was temporarily privatised in favour of a herder who had paid for it, while at the same time the villagers could continue to make free use of it (e. g. collecting firewood, esparto or wild berries). The ambiguity of the legal status in practical terms is the outcome of the myriad possible uses of the land providing resources.
The view that became consolidated in Spain between 1812 and 1848 was that all communal property belonging to villages and villagers was to be considered municipally owned monte público.11 This imposed a restrictive interpretation of property rights that benefited local authorities to the detriment of the villagers as a collective. Yet together with the state, or with its subunits such as provinces, we also encounter other administrative entities of medieval origin, which were eventually recognised by the municipal law of 1877. There are the small villages that enjoy political recognition, in the form of district councils and local magistrates. So, too, and by extension, do the federations of municipalities that receive an array of different names (e. g. mancomunidades, comuneros), which often have their own governing bodies (juntas) for managing the commons.12 Since 1968, Spanish law also recognises a type of collective private property referred to as neighbourhood-owned commons (montes vecinales en mano común), which are particularly widespread in the region of Galicia, where the rights of use are linked to the status of vecino, a village citizen, and are lost when the person moves away to live somewhere else.13 We are therefore dealing with a huge range of different formulas that reflects the diversity of the landscape in Spain, the manner in which it has been settled, and its social structures.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, when we have a more complete set of statistics, all these assets accounted for over twelve million hectares (ha) or 24 per cent of Spain’s total surface area. Of these, according to the 1982 agrarian census, the greater part (5.5 million ha) were classified as council lands, given that through their rental or allocation they provided a source of revenue for covering the costs incurred by local corporations. A further 4.6 million ha belonged to public entities other than these municipalities (one of them being the state). Finally, around two million ha at this time were classified as bienes de aprovechamiento común, to be used freely (or in exchange for the payment of a token fee) by local villagers.14
If this is the scenario we encounter at the end of the twentieth century, then how large might the surface area occupied by rural commons have been before the intense process of privatisation that took place between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century? There is no easy answer to this question. The general catalogue of public lands (Catálogo general de los montes públicos), published in 1859 to permit the implementation of the disentailment process, recorded an overall figure of 10.2 million ha, of which 3.4 million were...
