InstitutionClaim Cited
Japan's iriai forests joined customary village membership to collective rights, shared labor, consensus, and revenues for local public goods. Their endurance shows that a commons can be governed without individual title, while modernization, migration, aging, and legal conversion reveal how tightly ecological stewardship can depend on contested social boundaries.
How can a community hold and care for a forest across generations when membership, livelihoods, and state property law keep changing?
InstitutionClaim Cited
Women's argan cooperatives in southwestern Morocco formalized Amazigh knowledge of collecting, cracking, pressing, and using argan into member enterprises that could pool production, teach literacy, meet product standards, and reach distant markets. Formal ownership and new income did not settle who controls work, accounts, land access, certification, buyers, or margin, while market growth has not by itself restored the argan forest.
How can rural Amazigh women convert inherited argan knowledge and labor into collective bargaining power without losing control of the value chain or exhausting the forest on which it rests?