ROMANIAN MOUNTAIN COMMONS PROJECT

Calculations of individual shares were based on genealogies, on kinship relations to the presumed initial settlers. The pioneer settlers were considered to have equal rights to the land, by virtue of donations by the local rulers (voievod) or by virtue of first occupancy, meaning entitled for their labor in the process of creating property by slash and burn techniques. The initial settlers were considered to be the biological founders of all the village lineages. Thus, by partible inheritance rule, rights were allotted to all descendants of the initial settlers, preferably to males, but occasionally also to women through dowry and when there were no male heirs (Panaitescu 1964: 175-176).

According to Romanian sociologist Henri Stahl (1998), genealogies were a way to legitimize the protection of patrimonies against unwanted outsiders, and to justify inequalities. His opinion is that the presumed lineages did not necessarily consist of blood-based relations and the reconstruction of genealogies dealt with a certain degree of fiction. Dumitru Brezulescu, writing in 1905 about his own area in the Southern Carpathians, Novaci, showed that tracing genealogies back to the initial settlers usually ended up in a “labyrinthic confusion” (Brezulescu 1905). He also shows how the literate elites of villages, who made the genealogies, usually took advantage of various inconsistencies.

The formal recognitions of who was entitled to what, drawn up into documents by local judges and jurors, followed different particular rationales, in a rich diversity of local practice. By and large, the introduction of shares was facilitated by the participation of peasants into the cash economy and by the presence of a developed land market. 

Observing abuses in grassroots operations of formalization, as well as environmentally and socially threatening practices of the industrial forestry companies (Botez 1923), political actors launched a state-driven formalization of rights to the commons, through the adoption of the Forestry Code in 1910. In Transylvania, the Code was also taken on in 1923, after the unification in 1918 and the property reform from 1921

The formalization of rights in the commons was ideologically a mixed bag of liberal individualism and nationalistic collectivism. It created a ‘crossbreed’ of mountain commons. While recognizing the collective as a legitimate owner and manager, thus trying to incorporate customary tenure principles, the 1910 Code was keen on institutionalizing individual inheritable entitlements. To some extent, it recognized what was already being practiced at grassroots level, the form of undivided (non-enclosable), inheritable personal rights to the commons, similar to the system in Transylvania, and with the same negative consequences of fragmentation and delocalization. The technical management of the forests was to be done by the specialized state forestry service, the House of Forests, according to management plans, that were yet to be created and implemented from 1910 onwards. The communities of users, through the commoners’ assemblies and the local institutions of obște and retained the right to devise their own rules for using the land, for electing management boards, for voting, for distributing benefits, or instituting sanctions. The assembly also had to be consulted in the case of sales.