for those interested in commons, historical forms of collective land governance, insular commons and community development, landscape justice and historical institutionalism...
Although commons do not have a legal status in Greece, and common land did not historically exist as in the rest of the European feudal settings, our paper reveals a long tradition of collective land and resources management developed on Astypalaia Island in South Aegean Sea.
The Ecclesiastical Charity Fund of Astypalaia Island (ECFA), or 'EFTA' abbr. in Greek, is a commons institution, officially recorded at the beginning of the 19th century, which has managed to survive and evolve up to the modern-Greek state. Although the ECFA had for long mediated multivariate local demands, ranging from infrastructure needs to an equal access to land and resources by the Astypalaians, its commons structure is currently under threat due to both exogenous (nationwide policies) and endogenous (organisational structures and governance capacity) parameters. Our article published in the special issue of Landscape Research Journal, adopts a historical institutionalist approach in order to place this distinct LCs case within a wider ‘path-dependency’ institutional context and to unfold critical factors that have fostered or restrained the ECFA’s resilience and evolution through time.
You can find the article here:
Delladetsimas, P. M., Katsigianni, X. Van den Broeck, P. (2021). Historical landed commons in Greece: a governance system at risk on Astypalaia Island, Landscape Research, DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2021.2016665
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