Small-scale European forestry, an anticommons?

Abstract

In the article, I look at a phenomenon present in many small-scale European forests, their underutilisation. This underutilisation is obvious when it comes to timber extraction, but it can be argued that it is also present in relation to certain ecological or social uses of the forest. I do not want to judge this phenomenon in the article, but want to understand the reason this underutilisation occurs. Looking at forest resources worldwide and also in history, we conventionally face a problem of overuse. Taking first the property rights theory, I then refer to the tragedy of the anticommons to analyse the underutilisation. We observe a spatial anticommons in our forests. Even if the outcome of the tragedy of the commons and of the tragedy of the anticommons are opposed, I argue that analysing the solutions to the problems requires the same theoretical background. Both are collective action problems. However, compared to problems observed in forests elsewhere, the conditions for collective action are substantially different in the regarded case. In closing, I briefly compare forests as anticommons with other debates on the anticommons going on in the other debates around the commons.