Commons and peasant studies: Insights from social anthropology, human geography and agrarian economics

In Chapter 4, ‘Commons and peasant studies: insights from social anthropology, human geography and agrarian economics’, Tobias Haller, Karina Liechti and Stefan Mann discuss socio-cultural, economic and space-related systems and take an interdisciplinary social science perspective on the institutional change of the commons. They offer a broad overview of relevant approaches related to Swiss rural societies and commons studies in anthropology, human geography and agrarian economics. They explain the role that new institutionalism plays in the analysis, outline the work of Netting and Ostrom, and subsequently focus on institutional change and the role of bargaining power and ideology elaborated by Jean Ensminger (and revised by Tobias Haller), as well as the way power can be analysed from political ecology perspectives. They conclude by outlining the relevance of non-economic and identity utility for the maintenance of the commons, and reflect on resilience, vulnerability and bottom-up institution-building (constitutionality) in the ‘Swiss lab’