Coping with Dismantling Forces: Traditional Management and Transformations of Székely-Hungarian Village Commons of Transylvania, in the 16–21th Centuries

Abstract

The Székelyföld region of Transylvania, Romania is a unique social-ecological system and a traditional farming landscape with rich biological and cultural diversity. Commons institutions have ancient roots here, and are still prevalent today. In this paper, we attempt to give an overview of the traditional organisation, accelerating challenges, transformations and reorganisations of the Székely commons over their history based on existing literature, covering the interval between the 16th and 21th centuries. Based on this overview, we also identify key drivers for resilience that counteracted dismantling forces, to account for the long persistence and transformability of these institutions. We found that between the end of the 16th and the mid-19th centuries, Székely commons showed remarkable stability in their functioning based on village bylaws, and these documents also demonstrate that most communities could be characterised by Ostrom’s design principles in this period. From the 19th century, the pressures of state centralisation, market integration, new technologies, population growth, polarisation and changing values intensified, creating significant dismantling forces. However, Székely commons survived, and we argue that the harsh mountainous environment and isolation, coupled with locally rooted identity, worldview and a rich institutional memory, and also the traditional notions of equity and the widespread availability of common resources constituted elements of resilience, which helped to prevent dissolution. We conclude that as direct human-nature links lie at the heart of many of the identified drivers for resilience, nurturing these links seems essential for the survival of traditional local institutions and management practices that maintain biological and cultural diversity in a globalised world.