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Origins, dynamics and consequences of institutions for collective action

Our team focuses on the development of institutions for collective action, which are institutions that are built and managed by the stakeholders themselves in order to tackle certain problems. In literature the repertoire of collective action is usually limited to the large-scale mass movements that could often make their points only by recourse to riots, demonstrations, or forms of mass violence such as peasant revolts (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001). With this research we want to broaden the perception of collective-action-historians by also including institutionalised forms, such as guilds and commons. Sociologists and political scientists have made extensive studies of the internal workings of similar institutions in modern societies, mainly in Third World countries. These studies show that self-governance is an important key to the long-term survival of these institutions (Ostrom, 1990). We will combine theories developed by this social science research with long-term historical data on collective action institutions like craft guilds, commons, beguinages, and waterboards and – in due time –, also post-1800 institutions of this kind, such as co-operatives. A study of the causes of their longevity, combined with data on economic, social, political and environmental change, will provide a better understanding of the impact of this particular type of institutions on economic development in the very long term. An important element in the study of institutions for collective action is their relationship with the formation of a modern economic, both from the perspective of seeing these self-governing and usually highly participatory institutions as “schools for democracy” as from the perspective that by their mediating influence on society they contributed to the development of modern-day democracy. We pursue several missions. 

Understanding of durable cooperation by comparing similar institutions for collective action throughout time and space

Whereas the historical literature tends to discuss each type of institution for collective action separately, our group tackles them all at once whereby the fact that they have some institutional features in common (cf. De Moor, 2008) is taken as the starting point for the analysis. All these institutions tried to answer certain social dilemmas and used collective action as a method to create economies of scale and to avoid risks – both natural and market-related, and to restrict outsiders from accessing scarce resources. Commons (for instance markegenootschap and meent in the Netherlands, Gemeinde and Genossenschaft in Germany) were created for the collective management and use of natural resources. These institutions limited the impact of harvest failures due to unpredictable weather, floods, or diseases, while on the other hand they saved on investments in, for example, fencing and drainage systems. These institutions, moreover, created social security provisions for their members, as can be seen in the guilds’ provisions for widows and orphans. Besides commons and guilds, the best known types of such institutions, there are other forms to be considered as well. The beguinages, in the literature sometimes labeled ‘female guilds’ emerged in the Middle Ages as more or less independent corporations of single women. Apart from their similarities with guilds in terms of economic activities, the beguines found a comparable advantage in terms of safety (risk avoidance) and the sharing of resources. Similar arguments can be made for waterboards and friendly societies or journeymen boxes. The co-operative strategy allowed the members to share the costs that arose from uncertainty. Collective action helped to tackle problems that neither individuals, nor family relations were able to solve, simply because their resources were inadequate.

Understanding the dynamics of institutions for collective action

Institutions regulate certain aspects of society into durable and recognizable patterns, which can be copied, multiplied, and adapted for new purposes. Some studies have, in the past, focused on the efficiency of the individual institution. That efficiency is explained as a lowering of the transaction costs and improvement of the provisioning of information between members (North, 1990). The potential benefits that arise from the copying of an institutional design have, on the other hand, received very little attention so far. It is known that bottom-up organisation, self-governing institutions such as guilds, commons, beguinages, co-operatives etc. often used the same rules to prevent free-riding. Copying rules that have already been tried out by others in similar situations can help members of an organisation to reduce negotiation costs during the initial stages, and learning costs later on. At the same time many institutions simply developed their own rules to tackle their own locally specific problems. All these institutions also faced sooner or later the need to adjust their rules to changing political, social, economic, religious, ecological and even cultural circumstances. The degree to which they can cope with such changes ("resilience") is reflected in the way in which they adapt their regulation and the monitoring of the application of such regulation. We try to achieve a better understanding of how these mechanisms of institutional copying actually worked in the past, and how institutions were able to adjust to changing circumstances via analyzing the regulation and the response of the stakeholder-community to this. These are issues that have so far remained unstudied within the field of New Institutional Economics. Our research team maps out where and when such institutions popped up and how they functioned (via analyzing bodies of regulation). We try to find out what made these institutions so resilient for external shocks and internal problems. Understanding such regulation is also useful for today: it helps us to create alternatives for the regulation of common pool resources via the market or the state, which have proven not to be always the most sustainable and efficient ways.

Integrating the (very) long-term approach in institutional analysis

We need to look at institutions for collective action from a long term perspective. First of all, an institution needs time to get in shape, to be modeled according to the needs of those involved, and these institutions change slowly: a (semi-)democratic process for the change of rules requires time-consuming consultation of all the stakeholders involved. Secondly, the success of an institution, once well in place, can to a certain extent be measured by its longevity. In many cases such institutions have survived for centuries, and it was mainly by external force or the lack of external recognition that they were dissolved. As such it is only logic to go back in time, even to the early modern history, to follow institutional development over sometimes hundreds of years. By doing this, in combination with an examination of the stimulating and/or threatening factors that these institutions were dealing with we can understand what makes cooperation successful and when it fails. History thus is essential to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying institutions for collective action. We go back far into history to study these institutions here because – and this is central to the discussion on the importance of institutions world-wide – it proves that it is exactly when institutions manage to survive for a long time – even centuries – that a society can benefit most from them. Europe’s medieval and early modern history provides a wide variety of examples of collective action institutions. Perhaps the craft guilds are the best-known, but they display many similarities with, for instance, waterboards, beguinages, rural commons and urban communes.

Understanding change in institutional diversity

One of the “messages” underlying the projects of this team is that institutions for collective action can be a suitable way to govern resources sustainably and efficiently, depending on the type of resource and the circumstances. We do not advocate that such institutions offer solutions to all problems or that they are “better” than the private or state solution. We simply offer the tools to find out when, why and how institutions for collective action have and can offer the right incentive structure to solve problems. Institutions for collective action that thrive on self-governance and reciprocity can be a viable alternative for the massive administration costs state governance bring along, or the externalities of market regulation. It offers advantages of scale and demands shared responsibilities but such institutions are nevertheless not that omnipresent in the Western world as you would expect. They have been, before a large liberalization and privatization movement abolished many such institutions especially in the nineteenth century, but today, they are of lesser importance in the economy. With our team we try to understand what are the conditions to create “room” for institutions for collective action to emerge, by going back to their very origins. Apart from a weak state structure and a specific beneficial legal structure, we believe the rather exceptional marriage pattern – which itself influenced the household formation system – in Western Europe was to a large extent responsible for these developments. We also try to understand why these institutions disappeared.

Understanding the formation of the civil society

The work of Douglass North has highlighted the importance of institutions for societies to prosper, socially and economically. More specifically, his work has underlined the importance of legitimate and to an important extent also democratic institutions. Our team is concerned with the institution of citizenship in the pre-democratic era. Following American sociologist Charles Tilly, citizenship is defined as “a continuous series of transactions between persons and agents of a given state in which each has enforceable rights and obligations”. The project attempts to understand how citizenship could shape a whole society during an era – before the French Revolution – when it was connected to membership of a local (usually urban) community. By doing so, it addresses an issue first raised about one hundred years ago by German sociologist Max Weber, who identified urban citizenship, as it emerged in medieval Europe, as the main course of Europe’s advance over other regions of the world.

Contributing to co-operation and sharing within the scientific community

It is our intention and hope that other researchers will use the materials that are produced by our team and that are offered – for free – via the website www.collective-action.info and that they will contribute their own material (datasets, publications, source material etc.) via this site. The material offered via this site has been read by several experts in the field, but is open to improvement by other experts. We hope that via interaction and re-use of our data by other scholars both the quality and the quantity of our data will increase over time. For the future, we hope to include much more information on other forms of institutions for collective action, particularly those that still function today. The data that are currently available refer mainly to the pre-1900, and in some cases to the pre-1800 period. Understanding how these institutions functioned is very valuable to understand any further developments in society, such as the nineteenth-century formation of labour unions, which was a near to logical consequence of the evolution guilds went through prior to 1800. We intend to add information on co-operatives in agriculture, banking and various other sectors, on labour unions, etc. The main focus will remain on organisations that have a primarily economic purpose, but we are open to suggestions to include other non-economic institutions.

Please fill in our contact form or contact the webmaster if you want to collaborate and/or contribute in the future.

"United We Stand". The dynamics and consequences of institutions for collective action in pre-industrial Europe  

Description

Europe’s economic development in the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution continues to fascinate scholars. In recent debates, institutionalised forms of collective action have been put forward as a key feature of Europe’s precocious development. This project examines that connection between institutions and economic development in detail. It also harks back to the origins of such institutions, teasing out the impact of changing family patterns that emerged in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages, which are often described as 'the European Marriage Pattern'.

Together with such factors as the absence of a strong state and a helpful legal framework, the weakening of family relations may have created opportunities for other, non-kin social organisations to emerge, explaining the strength of institutions for collective action in this part of the world. Interactions between economic growth, marriage patterns and collective action institutions will be examined on several levels. 

Aim

A European-wide analysis, using specific indicators for institutional development and demographic patterns, should help clarify our understanding of their temporal and geographical co-evolution. Regulations for several types of collective action institutions will be analysed for Western Europe (the Low Countries and England) and Southern Europe (Italy and Spain) to study the impact of household constitution and marriage patterns on institutional arrangements.

A third level of the project, to be subdivided in an urban and a rural study, will look into the application of such regulations in everyday practices, through the analysis of several case-studies of guilds, commons and beguinages in the Low Countries.

Finally, a small sub-project is added to promote the dissemination and exchange of the project’s data among the wider academic community. Several events will, moreover, be organised to stimulate debates about the topics raised by the project. In this way, the project aims to help understand Europe’s specific development trajectory in the centuries preceding Europe’s dominant role in the world economy (and world politics) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The project's emphasis on micro-level behaviour of households and their willingness to cooperate in collective action institutions, and these institutions' impact on economic development, is expected to cast a new light on the determinants of economic growth. Although the data are historically and geographically specific, the long-term perspective is bound to produce results that will be applicable to a much wider range of cases, including those of contemporary developing countries.  

Applicant of this project

Dr. Tine De Moor (Utrecht University)

Advisory board

Prof. dr. Jan Luiten van Zanden (Utrecht University)  

Prof. dr. Maarten Prak (Utrecht University)  

Project members

Dr. Tine De Moor (Utrecht University), project co-ordinator

René van Weeren BN BA (Utrecht university), project assistant

Dr. Annemarie Bouman (Utrecht University), postdoc researcher

Dr. Jaco Zuijderduijn (Utrecht University), postdoc researcher

Projectcode Utrecht University

GW.000272.1 

Extended version 

Click here for the extended version of the project description