Survival without sanctioning

The relationship between institutional resilience and methods of dealing with free-riding on early modern Dutch commons

Abstract

In the early modern period, much rule-making took place on the local level, also within institutions for collective action such as commons. The term ‘commons’ stood for both a wide range of natural resources and for the institution itself, which was characterised by self-governance and self-regulation. Recent literature on the regulation of collective resources puts much emphasis on the role of sanctioning in order to prevent freeriding among those who
are entitled to use the commons, and by those who have no rights but try to benefit. Another branch of the literature searches for the ‘holy grail’ of institutional success and tries to find out which ‘recipe’ works best for making commons sufficiently resilient to changes (e. g. population growth, economic crises, ecological change). The detailed study of eight Dutch commons of varying longevity in this article brings together, for the first time, both debates within a historical framework. Our study demonstrates that the longer an institution survived, the less energy its rule-makers spent on creating sanctions. Contrary to our expectations, not all rules were accompanied by a sanction. Moreover, the type of sanctioning changed over time according to a specific pattern. Some types of sanctions were only used in extreme cases, when nothing else worked. This article provides a much deeper understanding of how freeriding could be dealt with in an institution for collective action in order to ensure its survival.