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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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