Forest Commons as a Model for Territorial Governance

Abstract

Territorial governance enables territorial development, moving away from sectorial approaches, towards place-based and highly adaptable models. Most territorial governance studies take a socio-institutional, or spatial planning perspective. Still, territorial governance happens in and through other policy domains, interacting among them and with the territory in various ways, to produce territorial development. The sustainability of the latter is affected by the presence of collective action and socio-ecological resilience, best seen through the study of socio-ecological interactions. As an example to unravelling territorial governance through lenses of other policy domains, this chapter examines ecosystem-based forest commons’ governance. Resilience of forest commons as resources and as institutions leads the society towards sustainable territorial development at local and global scales. The illustration of this account comes through exploring the Albanian model of forest commons within a river basin. The model embodies all ecosystem values besides the merely utilitarian ones and discusses the dimensions of territorial governance for forest commons. It does so through fit-to-context factors for robustness and adaptability. Evidences are collected through visual surveys, interviews, and focus groups systematically researching a number of commons’ variables of endurance and functionality.