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THE COMMON-PROPERTY FORESTS OF CANTON TICINO, SOUTHERN SWITZERLAND: RELATIONS BETWEEN A TRADITIONAL INSTITUTION AND THE MODERN STATE 1803-2003 R.C. ZIMMERMANN 1994; updated 2004 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study of 200 years of history of the common-property forests of Canton Ticino, southern Switzerland, in particular of the conflicts between these ancient institutions and the modern state, had its genesis in, of all places, Madagascar. It grew out of discussions, heated at times, held among members of a team of consultants who were in Madagascar in 1991 in order to design an institution-building project in the natural resources field. Madagascar is, of course, a classical case of a poor country with weak state institutions and undergoing massive resource degradation, including deforestation. Its private sector is also embryonic (or was at the time, after a long period of "socialism"), and in the countryside private ownership, especially land titling, was also rudimentary. The question before the project design team, including the writer, was what kind of institutions should be proposed in order to deal with various resource problems. In the case of forests and rangelands, long ignored or mismanaged by the state, the tendency among the team members was to advocate the creation, or revival, of common- property institutions, which would own and manage these resources. This was not surprising since the team's "Bible" was the then newly-published "Governing the Commons" by Elinor Ostrom (1990). The writer, aware of the poor record of forest management by common-property institutions in Switzerland (often the same ones that manage the "alps" or high-altitude pastures quite well) warned against too rosy a view of common-property regimes for forests, especially those on long rotations. He vowed at the time to tell some day one story of Swiss common-property forests in some detail as a cautionary tale. This study is the result of that vow. The choice of Canton Ticino as a case study was easy because few Swiss Cantons have common-property institutions (known as "patriziati" or Corporations of Patricians or Burgesses) as entrenched and as active as this Canton. The forests of this Canton have long been a source of preoccupation in Swiss forestry circles. In addition, the writer has family ties to one Ticino "patriziato", and has known Ticino foresters for a long time. In this connection, he is particularly indebted to Ing. For. Ivo Ceschi, until recently Cantonal Forestry Director, for many informative discussions and for pleasant visits to the forests under discussion. The writer is also indebted to the archivists at the Cantonal Archives in Bellinzona, in particular Mr. R. Carmine who went out of his way to find uncatalogued materials. Over the years the writer has benefited from discussions (even arguments) concerning common-property institutions with Drs. Jamie Thomson, Asif Shaikh, Jacques Weber, Lars Carlsson, and Liz Alden Wily. Montreal, Canada October 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER II. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 4 1. Origins and membership 6 2. Some geographical, demographic and economic statistics 21 CHAPTER III. THE CORPORATION FORESTS AND THE MODERN STATE 1. Introduction 26 2. The "private" view of Corporations and their assets, and forest degradation, 1807-1857 30 3. Early forestry legislation and regulations, 1807-1870 39 4. The controversy over "free cutting" 43 5. Private property within common forests: the "quadrelle" 51 6. Private rights within common forests: the "jus plantandi" 58 7. Floods, the public role of forests, and the new Federal activism 60 8. "Progress in forestry and the pastoral economy are incompatible" 62 9. Debacle for the State: the Cantonal Forest Act of 1908 67 10. Trying again: the Bertoni Report of 1910, and the Cantonal Forest Act of 1912 70 11. From World War I to World II: subsidized watershed rehabilitation and last reprieve for the traditional forest economy 85 12. The post-war economic decline of the forests, the new consumer society, and the rise of ecological concerns 88 CHAPTER IV. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 102 REFERENCES CITED ANNEXES A -Article from the NZZ concerning Ticino Corporations (Jan. 1983) B - Title page of the Kasthofer Report of 1847 C - Letter from the Corporation of Airolo to Forest Service, May 1901 D - Title pages of the laws on Corporations of 1807, 1835, 1857, 1962 & 1992 E - Title page of the organ of the Ticino Alliance of Corporations I. INTRODUCTION One aspect of the heightened "ecological awareness" that began in the 1960s, notably since Hardin's provocative article on the so-called tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968), has been a growing interest in the governance of common-pool resources, particularly those vulnerable to overuse and degradation but not easily amenable to either state supervision or private appropriation. This interest grew out of the initial debate over the management of natural resources, which tended to be polarized between advocates of more state control and those who saw salvation in the privatization of natural resources. The spate of environmental legislation adopted throughout the industrial world in the 1970s reflects the former view. Examples of the latter view include the call to privatize national forests in the United States and the United Kingdom, auction sales of "pollution rights", and Western promotion of land titling in developing countries. More recently, however, alternative forms of governance have been sought, as it has became increasingly clear that "neither the state nor the market has been uniformly successful in solving common-pool resource problems" (Ostrom, 1990). The search for a "middle way" has led to the discovery or re-discovery of traditional forms of common-property management in both the developed and developing world. Much of the impetus for this scholarship has come from the practical need of development planners to find alternative ways to manage resources in countries where neither the state nor the private sector is effective, or even present in any substantial way. A reflection of this scholarly activity has been the creation of the Inter-University Working Group on Common Property in the U.S. in 1986, and its later transformation into the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP). Among the traditional forms of common-property management rediscovered by recent scholarship, especially in North America, have been the Swiss and other alpine communal management of summer pastures ("alps") (Netting, 1981; Ostrom, 1990; Stevenson, 1990). These high-altitude pastures have been used in common since times immemorial, and they are usually mentioned as a particularly successful or robust form of common-property management (cf. Ostrom, 1990, pp. 61-65, citing various authors), presumably worthy of adoption elsewhere. Some of this literature on the alps mentions in passing that the same institutions that manage the alps also manage forests and other lands communally (cf. Ostrom, 1990, p. 64). There is thus a risk of either implying or assuming that the common management of forests has been as successful as that for the alps. This would be misleading, as some authors have indeed noted (Ostrom, 1990, p. 225, citing others): ... some Swiss villages were not able to manage their forests as well as they managed their meadows. Some of the commonly owned forests were divided among villagers to become individually owned woodlots. The lots were generally too small for effective management, and they degenerated until intervention occurred in the nineteenth century... The whole story is, of course, more complicated than that. The present study was thus undertaken to show in some detail the record of communal management of forests in one Swiss Canton where the tradition of this management is probably more widespread and deeply-rooted than anywhere else in Switzerland. The Canton is the Ticino, located south of the main ridge of the Alps, and the only wholly Italian-speaking Canton in Switzerland. In this Canton, 78 percent of the total area and 74 percent of the total forest area are owned by common-property institutions to this day. These institutions may date from pre-Roman times, and until the mid-19th century they were a parallel form of local government. As late as 1908, they were powerful enough to force the repeal of a Cantonal Forest Act passed with the full force of the Swiss Federal legislation behind it. The study has focussed on the relations between the modern state established in 1803, in particular the Forest Service, and these common-property institutions as the latter have had to adjust to modern society and a changing economy. The writer has selected Canton Ticino as a case study not only because of the historical importance of its common-property institutions within Switzerland, but also because of personal and professional ties to these institutions and their forests. These ties may explain the interest, but they also greatly facilitated access to sources of information. The study has sought to answer a number of questions of the historical materials examined. It has tried to see the extent to which the common-property institutions in question converge towards, or diverge from, the theoretical definition of a robust or "long-enduring CPR institution" (Ostrom, 1990, pp. 88-102). In this connection the study, despite its focus on the forests, has explored at some length the question of membership in these common-property institutions, a question that is usually treated in general terms in the existing comparative literature on common-property management. Not surprisingly, non-Swiss authors tend to overlook the more arcane or unique aspects of Swiss political citizenship and its complicated relationship to common-property membership. In addition, membership in Swiss common- property institutions, which is essentially based on ancestral family ties and not necessarily related to resource use or need, is wholly dissimilar from that of institutions whose members actually need and use a specific resource such as a fishery or irrigation water, and therefore join such institutions.

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