In Cavalese, we had the chance to meet with the Scario and council of the Magnifica Comunita di Fiemme, the governing body of the Fiemme Valley, to learn about common property and resource management. The situation of Fiemme is unique – their history as a self-governing entity officially dates back to the early 12th century, and had likely existed many hundreds of years before that. Nowadays, the common property is held by a group of about 20,000 inhabitants of the valley called Vicini, a group with very strict entrance requirements – you must either be born to two Vicini parents, or reside in Fiemme for at least 20 years, before you’re eligible to be a Vicino. While in the meeting, we discovered that Alessio, our guide, was born in the valley and might actually be a Vicino!

Like many other parts of Italy, including the Venice Lagoon discussed by other bloggers previously, the council is in charge of managing the commonly-held resources of the valley, which mostly consists of timber in the mountains. As a community resource, the council carefully manages the timber harvest and ensures a sustainable harvest – last year, they only took about 70% of the timber mass grown since the previous year.

As opposed to “informally” managed commons, with no strict rules regarding their use, the Fiemme Valley is a tightly regulated and highly formally-managed commons. After meeting the council, Casey and I presented on the differences between formal and informal commons management, and the benefits and drawbacks of both. Our article was mostly concerned with the formal structure of the Fiemme valley commons, and how this functioned throughout history. The main difference between the two types of regulation is that, with an informally-regulated commons, any unfair overexploitation presents itself as a deadweight loss to the entire community, because of the lack of punishment mechanisms. A formally regulated commons trades this deadweight loss for the predictable cost of enforcing the established laws – law enforcement officials, judges, and jailers all carry a cost. However, Fiemme had throughout history included provisions which made community enforcement much easier – for example, by limiting the grape harvest to a specific date range, anybody trying to harvest too early would be easily noticed by the community at large, which cut down on enforcement costs. The formal structure also was better at recovering loss, in two ways – first, people caught violating the rules were made to repay the value of the property they took, along with a fine, which went towards paying enforcement costs. Secondly, free-riders, specifically trespassers, could be caught and fined, a mechanism which doesn’t really exist in an informally-managed commons. If anything, Fiemme proved that well-executed formal regulation could be more advantageous than informal regulation.

I know common property and resource management is exciting, but we’ve just arrived in Sicily. Today we visited Ragusa and a chocolate factory, and tomorrow, hopefully we’ll see some citrus groves, the scale efficiencies of which I’ll be addressing in my next blog post.