From privatisation to governed nature

Old and new approaches to rural commons in Spain

Abstract

The last decades have witnessed a shift in the studies on Spanish rural commons, in line with changes in the international social science and historical literature as a whole. The focus in the 1970s was on the privatisation process referred to as desamortización (disentailment), being considered one of the essential steps in the transition to capitalism. The recent revival of attention to rural commons has been concerned less with privatisation than with the real
functioning of commons institutions and the social relations surrounding them. A further thrust of interest has been the interaction between rural society and the state, mainly with respect to forestry policy and its effects on different regions. A third flourishing field of research is the emergence of conflicts around rural commons – not only those of a distributive nature but also environmental and political ones. Accordingly, these new approaches go beyond the old image of a fatal destiny in order to profoundly analyse the environmental and social dimensions of rural commons’ dynamics.