Commoning, access, and sovereignty: Disentangling land–food relations in the case of peasant livestock farmers in Romania

The emergence of global food value chains under the auspices of free trade and neoliberal policies—also known as the “corporate food regime” (McMichael, 2009a, 2009b)—is replacing systems of production and consumption based on “food from somewhere” with “food from nowhere” (McMichael, 2009a). The corporate food regime operates through large transfers of raw materials, food products, and people from their localities to distant commodity markets, across time and space, creating global yet invisible food chains and disembodied webs of relations (McMichael, 2005, 2009b).

The ways in which the contemporary global economy of food devalues community-based knowledge and production logics (McMichael, 2005, 2012) threatens agrarian communities’ autonomy and food self-provisioning capacity worldwide. To resist, agrarian communities and peasant-activist groups are mobilizing at both grassroots (Welch and Edelman, 2001; Azevedo, 2016) and international levels (Desmarais, 2002; Borras et al., 2008; Holt Giménez and Shattuck, 2011) to demand the right to self-determination and food autonomy, simultaneously denouncing the violent accumulation of seeds, land, water, and biodiversity under corporate and state mandates (Welch and Edelman, 2001; Desmarais, 2002; Borras et al., 2008). La Via Campesina (LVC) is the transnational peasant organization founded in 1993 in Belgium which today gathers millions of peasant organizations, landless people, women farmers, and small- and medium-sized agricultural organizations and workers from all over the world (Nyéléni Declaration on Food Sovereignity, 2007; Rosset and Martínez-Torres, 2014; Nyéléni Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology, 2015). It contributed meaningfully to enhancing the food sovereignty (FS) movement and put FS as a theme on the global political agenda since the UN Food and Agricuture Organization World Food Summit in 1996. Through the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), the main organizing platform of the growing FS movement, small-scale food producers and allied organizations have been working to collectively orchestrate their demands and position themselves in global policymaking spaces, like the Committee on World Food Security. In the process of drafting the Nyéléni Declaration on Food Sovereignty (2007), the convergence of FS activists from the Global North and South has opened the possibility for the articulation of a shared political program for food systems outside the neoliberal logic of production and consumption. In this process of convergence, up until now, we believe that the everyday experiences and struggles of rural and urban communities in the Global North peripheries, meaning regions that do not host the headquarters of the political and economic power of the neoliberal system, peripheries that include post-socialist countries, can contribute significantly to building new alliances and advance the FS debate.

The land covers a pivotal material and symbolic dimension in the struggles for FS (Fairhead et al., 2012; Clapp, 2014b; Li, 2014; Sippel and Visser, 2021). Yet the connections between land and food production—especially the social, economic, and ecological relationships between formal and informal land governance systems that shape food production practices in contemporary Europe—are underexplored (Peluso and Lund, 2011; Borras and Franco, 2012; McMichael, 2012). This research focuses on marginalized experiences of land governance in 21st-century Eastern Europe aiming to deepen the discussion about commons and commoning in relation to the hegemonic visions on land property.

This article examines an underexplored European region with a unique institutional context, Romania. Romania offers a relevant scenario for at least 4 reasons: its institutionalization of communal land use, the existence of ancestral agroecological practices, its rooted peasant culture, and its spatiotemporal position between a past socialist economy and present embeddedness in the European Union (EU) neoliberal frameworks and policies. Recent research sheds light on an emergent but “shy” FS movement in Romania (Velicu, 2019; Hajdu and Mamonova, 2020; Velicu and Ogrezeanu, 2022). However, comparatively less research has focused on the synergies between communal land governance, traditional agroecological practices, animal husbandry, and articulations of FS in this region. Our research is guided by the following questions: What are the implications of communal pastures for land access and how does commoning relate to FS in Romania? How do mechanisms of access to land affect FS of peasant farmers? To answer these questions, we conducted multi-sited ethnographic research on land governance and farming practices. The methods and results bring us closer to the everyday struggles of commoners against the current institutional landscape, and the entanglements between formal and informal institutions that make land the basis of wealth and identity. The data analysis was guided by the Theory of Access framework (Ribot and Peluso, 2009) and FS discourse. The analysis of everyday food practices through an institutional lens (property rights, law, regulations, and customary norms) allows for an understanding of sovereignty in its multiple forms (quiet/unconscious or conscious), recognizing the heterogeneity of the peasant responses and their relations to food production and land governance. The article is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines the theoretical background. To answer the research questions, we rely on 4 conceptual dimensions: (a) commons (from an access theory perspective), (b) land (commoning and land sovereignty), (c) FS, and (d) quiet sovereignty. Section 3 describes the methodology shaped by a multi-sited ethnography approach (Marcus, 1995). Sections 4 and 5 present the findings paying attention to scale, first from the national and then from the local level. The last section discusses the findings and concludes by outlining implications for theory and practice.

The theory on commons advanced by Elinor Ostrom has paid great attention to disentangling common property regimes and the influence they exert on resource management (Schlager and Ostrom, 1992; Agrawal, 2001; Ostrom and Hess, 2008; Fennell, 2011). In their analysis of property rights, Schlager and Ostrom (1992) identified 5 different types of rights that a person or group can hold over a resource: access, extraction, management, exclusion, and alienation. Four actors have been identified, which can hold different roles according to their position in the property regime: owner, proprietor, authorized users, and claimants. Depending on local contexts and resource systems, property rights become “bundles” that can exist in varying combinations and can be held separately or together by the actors involved. Nevertheless, collective-choice arrangements, namely the rules devised by actors based on the property forms, dictate resource use, rather than property rights in the juridical sense. Schlager and Ostrom (1992) distinguish between rules and rights, arguing that the former is a product of the latter, as stated: “for every right an individual holds, rules exist that authorize or require particular actions in exercising that property right.”

More recently, commons thinkers point out that focusing solely on property systems overlooks other structural factors that enable or hinder the realization of commoning projects (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017; Quintana and Campbell, 2019). We agree that in the context of commons and commoning, not problematizing access beyond property arrangements and rules undermines the potential of commons to recognize structural barriers and to function as equitable resource-sharing models (Sikor and Lund, 2009; Kashwan et al., 2021). Ribot and Peluso (2009) revitalize the concept of access as the “ability to derive benefits from things,” making it a matter of capabilities rather than rights (Johnson, 2004). This perspective further problematizes how access is negotiated through power in inter- and intra-community relations, expanding the analytical dimension from “bundle of rights” to “bundle of powers.” They distinguish between 2 forms of access: control (the power to mediate others’ access) and maintenance (the power to retain access to a resource). Legal or formal access relies on rules and enforcement, yet it often reveals itself through ambiguities that act as barriers (Ribot and Peluso, 2009; Peluso and Ribot, 2020). Most importantly, access is not limited to legal arrangements; it also encompasses knowledge (so also technology and information), capital, labor, identity, authority, and social relations, which become essential for meaningful participation in any resource system.

Land as a resource system has been central in commons theory as well as in the practice of commoning, particularly in the context of agriculture and food production (Borras et al., 2015; Calo et al., 2021). Historically from the British enclosures (Linebaugh, 2008) to the recent financialization of land and land grabbing (Clapp, 2014a; Visser, 2017), the common use of land has been constantly undermined and land increasingly commodified to resemble a unidimensional private asset (Borras and Franco, 2012; Dell’Angelo et al., 2017; Burja et al., 2020). We cannot discuss this phenomenon only by looking at the changes in formal institutional settings, since the boundaries across the different abstract categories of land property (private, public, common, and open access) are in practice blurred (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017) and property rights often hybrid or customary (Ostrom and Hess, 2008; German and Keeler, 2010; Fennell, 2011). Moreover, the role of the state and its authority in guaranteeing (property) rights is put under scrutiny (Wolford et al., 2013; Rudel and Hernandez, 2017). Research shows that the state has been an accomplice in the historical enclosures of common lands and plays a critical role in land grabbing (Linebaugh, 2008; Federici, 2011; Borras and Franco, 2012; Wolford et al., 2013; Dorondel, 2016; Dell’Angelo et al., 2017). However, the state itself is not a monolithic, single actor that can be held easily accountable, but a dynamic assemblage of bureaucrats and partisans, rules, customs, and competing agendas interacting at multiple levels (Verdery, 2002; Peluso and Lund, 2011; van der Ploeg et al., 2015). To some, land is much more than a quantifiable resource since it carries values and emotionality (Sippel and Visser, 2021). It is not only a source of livelihood; it is also a home and a social space. From this perspective, land management is not a purely technical matter but a process embedded in different forms of access (control or maintenance) (Calderón-Contreras and White, 2019) and affection (Vasile, 2019). Hence, we approach land commoning not on a legal-institutional basis but as a political-relational phenomenon. Following the relational approach, we employ the category of sovereignty as an enabler principle which entails ongoing negotiations to grant access to and maintain control over necessary resources in the food production process, specifically land (Borras and Franco, 2012; Borras et al., 2015). Borras and Franco (2012) define land sovereignty as “the right of working peoples to have effective access to, use of, and control over land and the benefits of its use and occupation, where land is understood as resource, territory, and landscape.” We combine this definition on land sovereignty (Borras and Franco, 2012) with the theory of access proposed by Ribot and Peluso (2009), acknowledging that property rights alone are insufficient to tackle structural problems related to land use. Given the pressure to transition to market-based economies, post-socialist contexts become fertile grounds for inquiry into land and FS questions as on the one hand, privatization processes open new frontiers for accumulation and land grabbing (Visser et al., 2012). On the other hand, the transitions to market-based food economies have uncovered latent symbiotic relationships between the state and individuals (Visser, 2009), but also forms of peasant resistance that contribute to the realization of FS ideals in places where overt political struggle seems impossible (Visser et al., 2015).

Food sovereignty is:

From the activist perspective, FS is not a concept, but rather a process, something that is happening through peoples’ struggles (Paul Nicholson, quoted in Schiavoni, 2017). As such, at the level of practice and activism, it has been more relevant to examine the “how to respond” rather than the “what is the problem” set of concerns. When it comes to the “how,” FS activists have largely adopted agroecology as a set of principles and practices that can guide transformations throughout the food system for the sustainable use of life-generating resources including water, land, seeds, knowledge, and culture (Altieri and Nicholls, 2012; Rosset and Martínez-Torres, 2014; Nyéléni Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology, 2015). FS proponents use agroecology as an opportunity for convergence (Rosset and Martínez-Torres, 2014) and also as an alternative proposal to industrial agriculture and the corporate capture of knowledge and resources (Holt-Giménez and Altieri, 2012). Going beyond the scholarly ontological discussion about the definition and principles of FS (Edelman et al., 2014), in this research, we understand FS from a relational perspective (Iles and Montenegro de Wit, 2015; Shattuck et al., 2015), embracing an agroecological focus and expanding on the idea of FS as a process rather than as an “outcome.”

Viewing FS as a process continuously constructed, contested, and resisted, Iles and Montenegro de Wit (2015) talk about multiple overlapping sovereignties across levels of government and geographical scales that interact with each other. The pluralization of sovereignty is a result of the dynamic/relational account which has been more recently applied to the notion of sovereignty in the food transition debate (Shattuck et al., 2015). In political theory, sovereignty is rooted in the construct of the nation-state and of the legal frameworks that establish and limit state authority within and beyond its territorial boundaries. The FS idea is nationalist in its origin, concerning the struggle to bring food back to the jurisdiction of the state and its peoples, taking it away from the deregulated market (Shattuck et al., 2015). However, this idea has evolved through the dialectic practice of activists and scholars into a plural and fluid concept, which entails a multiplicity of forms (i.e., food, land). This implies acknowledging a more complex and diversified relationship between FS as a movement and the state, which can be of complementarity, cooperation, trust/distrust, conflict, or reciprocal exclusion (Shattuck et al., 2015).

Authors such as O. Visser, working in post-socialist states and particularly in Russia, have inquired what happens when the relationship between civil society and the state, between peasants as social agents and the political sphere, is absent or squeezed because of a past of dictatorship. Based on the specific historical context and relying upon the concept of quiet sustainability (Smith and Jehlička, 2013), these authors have introduced the concept of quiet sovereignty (Visser et al., 2015). Visser and coauthors (2015) define “quiet sovereignty” as the combination of implicit and explicit ideas and practices, clearly linked to the principles of FS, that are widespread across a local population, and thrive without a formal organization, “outspoken discourses or coordinated actions” (Visser et al., 2015). Such a conceptualization is key to understand traditional land management practices, among which commoning in the Romanian context as an expression of FS. To explore the relationship between land commoning and FS in Romania, it is however necessary to base the discussion in the historical context of post-socialist states. FS is primarily a transnational social movement, which is openly challenging global order. Nonetheless, as Visser et al. (2015) point out, it is not possible to investigate FS practices from the lens of organized social movement in ex-authoritarian contexts, where social mobilization is consciously absent and silent (Ayres and Bosia, 2011; Visser et al., 2015).

Scholars working with the emerging concept of quiet FS contend that in the everydayness of small-holder farms’ food production, there is a form of resistance that should be recognized as political. For post-socialist agrarian scholars, the practice of subsistence food production in these countries, largely characterized by the ecological production of local and healthy food (Smith and Jehlička, 2013), deserves political recognition by the FS movement, despite its “quietness” and perceived social marginality. Subsequently, the concept of “quiet FS” proposes a revision of focus and analytical tools used in understanding and investigating political activism. In these contexts, FS should be explored through everydayness, acts of silent resistance, and muted discourse. As Visser et al. (2015) observe, social norms and everyday practices become productive sites of inquiry across institutional scales (subsistence vs. industrial; household vs. state; etc.), showing their interconnectivity and the multiplicity of sovereign agents in countries without a structured social mobilization.

The research has been carried out using an ethnographic approach. We employed multi-sited ethnography as a methodological framework. Specifically, multi-sited ethnography theorized by Marcus (1995) as it encourages a methodological shift from studying single sites as self-contained units of analysis toward researching multiscale and multilevel interactions across sites. In the multi-sited approach, the ethnographer engages with the geography (Marcus, 1995), that is, with the space both as materiality and relationality. Here the researchers are not simply observers but actors who play with their positionality in the different contexts and use this “in-betweenness,” from one site to another to interpret their empirics (Boccagni, 2014). We use the multi-sited method as a mapping exercise to identify arenas of struggle, where actors construct and enact principles of commoning, to observe the interaction between micro (emotions, customs, and everyday habits) and macro elements (laws and regulations). We adopted a twofold approach for data analysis and collection, the analysis of secondary data on the national scale and the fieldwork on the local scale. This approach allowed us to make sense of the data both in time and space.

The fieldwork was carried out by the first author between March and June 2022 in Southern Transylvania, Romania. The case studies are 2 villages, which will be anonymized and labeled as A and B for the sake of research ethics. Village A in the county of Braşov and Village B in Sibiu county were selected based on several criteria (Table 1). First, institutional differences and similarities. Both villages have communal pastures (izlaz), but the 2 contexts differ in how the islaz is institutionalized. Second, the 2 cases present distinctive socioeconomic conditions which influence the type and spread of agricultural practices. The municipality of Village A—formed by 3 Villages—shows a higher density of population, with more than half of its area utilized for agriculture. Whereas the municipality of Village B—formed by 5 villages—is scarcely populated, using more than 60% of the land area for agriculture. They present relevant commonalities in terms of food production. Crop and livestock production constitutes an important part of the local economy and is a primary source of livelihood at both sites. Pastures designated for communal use occupy more than half of the available pastureland in Village A, whereas in Village B, around 70% of the total area for grazing is for private use.

As shown in Table 2, distinct data collection methods were employed drawing from a larger pool of data sources and a diversity of data formats (see Table 2). To understand the legal background and processes as well as to collect basic quantitative information on the object of study (pastures), national and local legislative documents were extracted using the iDrept platform and municipalities’ official websites. Furthermore, several rounds of participant observation were conducted at the 2 sites followed by interviews with key actors. Two categories of actors were interviewed: (a) commoners, interpreted in this research as livestock farmers with access to the communal pasture; public servants, members of local municipal councils in Village A and Village B which are involved in pasture allocation, and (b) key informants, people who are neither beneficiaries nor have any other form of decision-making power but have particular knowledge about local conditions and/or land governance systems in Romania. These included grassroots activists, researchers, and other community members. The Romanian language was used in all the interactions, observations, and interviews. Interviews were transcribed and translated into English.

In the following 2 sections, we present our findings, first those related to the macro-level of analysis, and drawn from the secondary data sources (Section 4), and then those related to the fieldwork sites (Section 5).

In this section, we break down the historical trajectory of Romanian agricultural land governance and shed light on the evolution of land commons from the 18th century to nowadays (Figure 1).

The consolidation of the main regions (Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldova) forming the modern Romanian state is a relatively recent historical development. Imperial agrarian acts and reforms have led to significant disparities in land access and governance across these regions (Sikor, 2005; Măntescu and Vasile, 2009; Opincaru and Vasile, 2021). Tracking the first instances of communal land ownership is challenging due to the scarcity of written records before the 19th century (Cotoi and Mateescu, 2013). However, local customs and institutions governing forests and pastures have existed for generations and were eventually codified into legislation in the early 20th century, starting in Transylvania under the Austro-Hungarian administration. The Forest Code of 1910 institutionalized community-owned lands throughout Romania, although mainly in Transylvania (Măntescu and Vasile, 2009; Cotoi and Mateescu, 2013).

With the establishment of the modern Romanian state in 1918, the agrarian question was redefined as a social issue, prompting increased attention to rural social dynamics (van Meurs, 1999). The agrarian reforms of 1921 aimed to grant land rights to peasant communities and landless peasants, introducing new complexities into the common property regime. However, Romania’s entry into the Second World War in 1940 interrupted the pro-poor land reforms and the agrarian question was abandoned. The Bolshevik invasion in 1945 marked the transition to a socialist regime, leading to a profound restructuring of the countryside through the complete collectivization of agriculture. This involved the abolition of private and collective property, with land and assets transferred to state ownership. In the early years of collectivization, peasant and landowner resistance faced violent suppression, and villages were rapidly integrated into the state-led planned economy through dispossession and forced labor (Kligman and Verdery, 2011; Micu, 2012).

In this climate of terror, subsistence farming was tolerated and became a form of everyday resistance, giving rise to new transversal solidarity networks (Stan, 2000). The food provisioning practices and rural–urban networks that emerged during the socialist regime continue to influence post-socialist foodscapes (Mantescu, 2009; Varga, 2019; Visser et al., 2019) even after privatization efforts and the integration of socialist countries in the post-socialist global economy.

The “Land Fund Law” 18/1991 (Legea Fondului Funciar) is a milestone piece of legislation that shapes the contemporary Romanian property regime and land administration. The law opened the land redistribution process and had 2 objectives: to return forests, pastures, and cropland to the former owners based on poorly recorded pre-socialist property arrangements (Verdery, 1998; Vasile, 2019), and to transfer ownership and authority over land from the national government to regional and local authorities (Mantescu, 2009; Opincaru and Vasile, 2021).

As the 2 objectives were implemented simultaneously and under time pressure, the land restitution process revealed competing interests in land ownership and contested property relations, stirring tensions between peasants and local elites but also between peasant families (Verdery, 1998, 2003; Sturgeon and Sikor, 2004). Conditioned by the proof of collective ownership from pre-socialist times, the process of reconstruction of social memory proved tedious and uneven across the territories and many communities and individuals did not manage to provide the necessary documentation in time for restitution to happen (Vasile, 2007; 2009; 2018). Simultaneously, acts of fraud and corruption by local political elites deprived claimants of their historical entitlements, posing additional barriers to the process (Verdery, 2002, 2003).

To date, the country presents a great diversity of institutional regimes that grant property rights and access (Mantescu, 2009; Sutcliffe et al., 2013; see Figure 2). Pre-socialist (obsti and composesorate) and post-socialist (izlaz) institutions constitute 2 different clusters, which often coexist. Obsti and composesorate are formally recognized as legal bodies in the form of associations (Law 2005), with their own bylaws and decision-making systems. The members of these institutions hold property rights over pastures and forests, yet their shares are indivisible, meaning there is no exclusive right over material resource units. In composesorat, membership and shares are inherited, while in some obsti membership is granted based on residential status in the locality and the shares are equally distributed. Generally speaking, members can sell their right to the resource (shares), but not the resource per se. Decisions for the exploitation and maintenance are taken at the yearly General Assemblies through a majority vote.

Known as the former pastures used by CAPs (Cooperativa Agricola de Productie—Agricultural Production Cooperative) and IASs (Intreprinderi Agricole de Stat—Agricultural State Enterprises), the so-called “izlaz” or “communal pastures” are owned by municipalities. Through these commoning institutions, municipalities are in charge of overseeing plot allocation and management, through a formal process of attribution (proces de atribuire) established under the Law 1990/2000. This differs from the obsti and compossesorate, in the sense that decisions are not taken through direct participation of land users, but depending on the case, by the Local Councils and/or by livestock farmers active in a noncommercial, nongovernmental association mandated specifically to allocate land to their members. While the latter associations have the same legal form as the obsti and compossesorate associations, the difference lies in land ownership structures given that livestock associations do not always own the land under their administration. Figure 2 illustrates how these contemporary institutions place themselves within an imaginary line between public and private property.

In the early 2000s, excessive land fragmentation triggered by the land restitution process reversed the level of industrialization achieved under the communist regime (Aligica and Dabu, 2003) and resulted in a high incidence of subsistence and semi-subsistence farmers (Mathijs and Noev, 2004; Davidova et al., 2012). While the contribution of small-holder farmers to food security and FS in post-socialist states has been widely acknowledged in the literature (Mathijs and Noev, 2004; Visser et al., 2015; Dorondel and Şerban, 2018; Visser et al., 2019), “subsistence” has been portrayed as detrimental for modernization of the agricultural sector and the transition to the market economy (Varga, 2019), posing difficulties for Romania entering the EU (Davidova et al., 2012; Roger, 2014). Furthermore, in the pre- and post-EU accession era, some areas of the country experienced waves of large-scale land acquisitions which resulted in a concentration of land under foreign private capital (Franco and Borras, 2013; Agricultural Rural Convention 2020, 2015; Baker-Smith, 2017; Burja et al., 2020). In areas where corporate investments led to the consolidation of land, land became a scarce and expensive resource, excluding local communities that previously relied on land for their subsistence (Franco and Borras, 2013).

One of the most iconic national cases of peasants reclaiming rights to their land from foreign investors is Rosia Montana. The Rosia Montana anti-mining campaign proved to be extremely successful and remarkably effective in carving spaces of possibility for an active civil society to emerge in Romania. The countrywide mobilizations to resist environmentally harmful interventions in the area raised pertinent questions regarding foreign intervention and imposed development discourses (Velicu, 2012). In the aftermath of mass mobilizations and protests, rural farmers and urban activists founded EcoRuralis in 2009. This marked the birth of the first Romanian association dedicated to advocating for the rights of peasant men and women. The association is committed to safeguarding peasant farming and identity and has identified 7 overarching areas of concern to focus on including land, seeds, peasant agroecology, and markets. Up-to-date, EcoRuralis represents more than 17,000 members in all counties.

EcoRuralis subsequently became a member organization of the European Chapter of La Via Campesina in 2012. In the same year, EcoRuralis joined the Access to Land network, consisting of grassroots organizations from across Europe that aim to secure access to land for agroecological farming. Since then, land access has become a crucial aspect of the association’s work, particularly as the threat of land grabbing has intensified in Romania. As part of an EU-commissioned study on land grabbing in the EU, EcoRuralis collected and analyzed data for Romania and Hungary (Socz et al., 2015). The findings of the study prompted the EU Parliament to draft a resolution on the state of play of farmland concentration in the EU (EU Parliament, 2016/2141(INI)). Since its inception, EcoRuralis has been involved in issues of land access and use, starting with supporting the Rosia Montana anti-mining project, mapping land grabs, and working toward a “new” commons framework within the national Access to Land Network.

Currently, it is estimated that half of the total 3.4 million ha of grasslands in Romania are subject to collective grazing agreements (Sutcliffe et al., 2013), which implies that a large extent of the land use for livestock production in Romania is under common property regimes. An aspect rarely addressed in literature, but acknowledged by EcoRuralis, is the complementary relationship between communal and community-owned land and the private “small household plots,” which effectively support subsistence farming strategies, contributing to the local circuits of food production and agroecology (Baker-Smith, 2017). Analyzing national and local legislative acts, we followed closely the legal mechanisms through which farmers are granted access to the communal pastures and the implication for agroecological practices at the household and landscape level.

The Emergency Ordinance Act No. 34 of 2013 (OUG 2013) is the most important legislative act governing grazing areas in Romania at the national level to date. This Act prescribes the terms and conditions for the exploitation of pastures irrespective of their property arrangements. In the case of communal pasture, access, withdrawal, and management rights are regulated by an external body (national state) and conditionally shared with other actors in the resource system. Within the frame proposed by Schlager and Ostrom (1992) resource owners, the municipality in our case, enjoy the full bundle of rights. Municipalities are obliged not only to oversee the allocation of use rights but also to draft, monitor, and implement resource management plans (Amenajament Pastoral). The Local Councils appoint a special body (attribution commission—comisia de atribuire) to review requests and allocate land, thus delegating benefits and responsibilities through licenses and contracts (concessions). Through the OUG 2013, livestock farmers are identified as the main beneficiaries of direct use of the pasture. Other actors are user-based institutions, like livestock associations, registered as NGOs (Law 246/2005). The main role of the associations is to mediate interactions between users and owners in assigning land tenure rights (Law 34/2013). These associations assign individual plots of land to their members based on the number of livestock and the carrying capacity of the plot. Even so, the association remains solely responsible for maintenance of the whole pasture area following the environmental guidelines outlined by the municipality and external experts in the Amenajemnet Pastoral. Nevertheless, in practice, the outcomes of pasture allocations depend on local interpretations of national legislation.

The 2 case studies in Braşov and Sibiu counties present relevant commonalities in terms of food production. Crop and livestock production occupies an important part of the local economy and is a primary source of livelihood at both sites. Through ethnographic methods, we gathered stories from livestock farmers who benefit from access to the communal pastures and from the public officials who oversee the allocation and management of these pastures. The farmers interviewed identify themselves as peasant farmers or coming from a peasant background. The livestock farmers we followed during the fieldwork were not FS activists. Nonetheless, most of them are guided by agroecological principles in their pastoral and sedentary food production practices, despite not explicitly recognizing it as such. Table 3 presents an overview of the farm structure compiled from interviews and observation notes.

Historically, extensive grazing was organized at a large scale in what is known as transhumance (Huband et al., 2010). Despite the pressure of modernization and physical enclosure of land, some agroecological practices remain deep-rooted within small-scale livestock farms in the studied cases, among which extensive grazing and mixed farming methods. All farmers interviewed engage in both extensive grazing and complementary farming activities (Table 3). For example, besides haymaking, farmers reported growing crops (corn, wheat) using a rotational system to supplement winter feed, thus diversifying their production. The manure generated by the animals is matured over the winter and reintegrated in the fields during spring allowing for a closed-loop system to emerge (Interview, livestock farmer, Braşov county). Communal pastures are a means to ensure high-quality fodder and animal welfare which in turn stimulates milk production.

Our 2 cases present some features of the moving of herds at the change of season from winter to summer pastures. As pointed out by one interlocutor, this traditional practice relies on the idea of an open landscape with unrestricted physical access to land and shared routes.

The region where Village B is situated has witnessed a significant increase in foreign investments in land assets. The consolidation of land triggered by waves of foreign acquisition of private properties by international investors led to not only profound changes in the socioeconomic structure but also transformations in the broader landscape beyond individual plots. The installation of fences to delineate private plots makes the foreign presence in the area visible, as well as physically obstructs access to the pastures.

The grasslands surrounding the village serve as a vital wildlife corridor, facilitating movement of large carnivores and herbivores. As Figure 3 shows, local activists mapped out fences introduced in the area by the new landowners in an attempt to monitor the scale of land use change produced by new land management practices. Following the movement of wildlife along the fences, environmental activists concluded that these “imported” land practices impede the natural movements of animal wildlife. Consequently, farmers in Village B have reported that the practice of fencing has led to an increase in wildlife attacks on their livestock, resulting in significant economic losses. The following quotes provide insight into the viewpoints of local activists, shedding light on the tangible consequences of what can be defined as “land grabbing” (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017) on their daily lives and livelihoods.

In the case of Village A, cow and sheep grazing is organized separately. The lowland pasture surrounding the village is exclusively kept for cows, whereas sheep are moved to the alpine pasture under the supervision and care of a designated shepherd who is a member of the local livestock association in charge of all the sheep in the village. For the maintenance of ecosystem health and land productivity of grasslands, a set of land practices is prescribed by the municipality and external environmental experts at the local level through the Pasture Management Plans (Amenajament Pastoral). In the case of Village A, the association is responsible for the management of the pasture area by the Pasture Management Plans. Shrub and anthill removal have been identified as crucial for maintaining the quality of pasture. The existence of expert guidelines allows municipalities to monitor maintenance work. The association owns the necessary machinery to work at scale, while the cost of work is covered by subsidies. As reported by pasture users, formal monitoring is rare and traditional practices remain central to pasture resource maintenance.

Municipalities are invested with legal ownership of communal grazing areas under the Law 1990/2000, while the OUG 2013 gives further guidelines on grasslands access and use (Section 4.3). The communal pastures become the arena where visions of entitlements and land-use practices collide. While everyone is aware of the benefit of the existence of communal pastures for food production and recognizes the right to access land, the terms under which access is granted are subject to negotiation, conflict, and competition. Concerns have been raised on the side of peasant farmers concerning the legitimacy of the allocation process in both villages.

In Village A, the Local Council rents the land to the livestock association based on a fixed rent decided at the moment of lease. The association is then responsible for distributing plots to its members directly proportional to the number of livestock. Membership is conditioned by paying an annual contribution to the association fund and having the animals in the national registry. To receive pasture, members must make a truthful declaration of livestock numbers and pay an additional symbolic fee per head of animal. In case farmers do not have enough cattle to qualify for an individual plot, the association offers them a spot in the “village cattle.”

The association claims to stand as a collective action institution, protecting access to land for local livestock owners. However, recent land allocation negotiations (May 2022) brought forward complaints of undemocratic allocation of benefits and responsibilities within the bureaucratic apparatus. The constituents accuse the leadership of fraudulent practices in granting membership and land, which was partly confirmed by public officials (see excerpt of interview with the mayor below).

Another issue raised by members is fraudulent practices in managing EU agricultural subsidies. Livestock owners reported that the association leadership conditions them to transfer their entitlements to the EU subsidies as a hidden clause to maintain membership. In the absence of effective internal conflict resolution mechanisms, affected members submitted a complaint to the Direcţia Naţională Anti-Fraudă (anti-fraud national authorities) resulting in an ongoing investigation of the association leadership for corruption deeds—namely falsifying signatures and verbal coercion.

Secondly, livestock farmers who refuse to become members of the association for whatever reason can be excluded based on OUG 24/2013 legislation. This is illustrated by the example of Village A. The expiry of the 10-year lease granted by the Local Council in 2011 (HCL, 41) created the institutional circumstances for the renegotiation of the lease. The conflictual situation generated by a lack of transparency and allegedly fraudulent practices in the management of communal pasture by the association led the affected livestock farmers to apply for individual pasture plots, thus opting out of the association in a sign of protest. Despite farmers being designated as rightsholders in the legislation (i.e., the right to access land directly), the law does also acknowledge the right of livestock associations, often to the detriment of individual users. In case of competing claims, the final decision falls to the Attribution Commission appointed by the Local Council (HCL, 59). Based on the interpretation of OUG 34/2013 the Commission decided against granting land to individual farmers. Instead, the land was granted to the association of livestock farmers (Meeting Proceeding, nr. 16427). From a theoretical perspective, this shows how legal means of access do not guarantee physical access if, as in this case, it is not coupled with access to (local) authority, which in our case is shared between the municipal government and the livestock association. When interviewed about the matter, local officials dismiss individual claims over land as subsidy-hunting, arguing that the existence of an association allows for equitable distribution of benefits among members. The following interviewees’ quotes show this tension between the opposed perspective of local public government, which argues in favor of the benefit of the communal institution (the livestock association), and livestock owners who perceive it as restricting their free access to the land.

Village B presents a different picture of dynamics shaping access to land. As reported by the municipality and farmers, in the years pre- and post-EU accession, land became a scarce resource, putting extra pressure on communal pastures. To respond to land shortages, the Local Council in Village B has established specific regulations governing this process of land allocation. While both individual and juridical persons registered within the locality are eligible to apply for pasture, nonresidents, including persons registered in the neighboring municipalities, are explicitly excluded from leasing communal land in the municipality.

In the absence of a livestock owners’ association, farmers in Village B acquire access to communal land on an individual basis directly through the municipality. This process begins with farmers submitting formal requests for land. When land becomes available, the municipality notifies the farmers and invites them to engage in a bidding process. In case there are several requests, the municipality organizes a public auction, attributing pasture to the highest bidder. To what extent this creates a level playing field across different socioeconomic groups is contested by farmers, especially since small-scale farmers compete with newly established businesses registered in the area, including foreign companies. If done according to the “rules,” the allocation process can exclude the most economically disadvantaged groups, who depend on the commons for subsistence. There is the danger that individuals who have time and money to invest in relationships with higher officials may be granted preferential treatment such as privileged access to information or priority in lease agreements.

Those seeking pasture must compete for limited land resources and, in the absence of capital, they are kept in a precarious tenure system. For example, some farmers in Village B have the financial capacity to lease land from newcomers, foreigners, or long-standing landowners. Others, however, rely on informal solidarity networks within the community, engaging in informal land rentals with neighbors, swapping land among themselves, or even offering temporary grazing opportunities to fellow farmers in times of need. This complex interplay of formal and informal land allocation mechanisms underscores the multifaceted nature of resource access in Village B.

While the association is a means to ensure access to land, we observed that its existence neither guarantees the meaningful participation of its members in the decision-making process nor land tenure security. As noted during the attribution process that took place in May 2022 in Village A, without the association’s membership, farmers are not entitled to land. Henceforth, being part of the association becomes a necessity, rather than a choice. On the one hand, despite the plots being divided among individual farmers based on the number of animals, the association remains there to act as a collective action institution where capital (derived from subsidies) and assets are commoned to maintain the pasture in compliance with the Environmental Assessments issued by the municipality. In Village A, it is the association that holds assets (tractors, machinery) that can be used by members for a small fee. Commoning also happens with the practice of alpine pasture which is used for sheep grazing for the village herd. Here the shepherd becomes the main negotiator between private owners and the board of the association.

Nonetheless, the land under the municipality’s jurisdiction is divided and assigned to farmers based on the number of animals, granting individual rather than collective rights. The relatively short-term leases (10 years) allow for a redistribution of land in cases of farm restructuring or mismanagement but also generate anxieties about the precarity of the tenure. At the same time, our findings suggest that in the absence of a livestock association to act as a collective action institution, the institute of the commons (izlaz) becomes questionable. For example, in the case of Village B, renting plots directly to individual farmers takes the plot out of the commons circuit and privatizes use and management rights. In the absence of a livestock association, as is the case of Village B, farmers renting individual plots do have direct access to EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies, be it per hectare payments (Pillar I) or compensations for grassland maintenance (Pillar II). These institutional arrangements might discourage them from seeking formal cooperation with other farmers by, for example, setting up cooperatives or livestock associations. Without an association working as a collective institution, agroecological practices are more subject to external threats. In Village B, foreign investors succeeded in grabbing land and local natural resources for the food industry and farmers have less strong representation in the local market compared to Village A. Furthermore, it is likely that the existence of the association has to some extent prevented the exposure of this specific site to corporate land grabbing despite increasing pressure and competing visions on land-use.

Despite being able to secure access to land through the commons, peasant farmers find it increasingly difficult to maintain agroecological practices and participate in the food system due to various structural lock-ins: effective participation in local markets, capital for investment, and bureaucratic requirements. In the view of farmers interviewed, their difficulty in maintaining access to land boils down to their socioeconomic identity as small-scale traditional farmers. The peasant ways of organizing life and work are regarded by local authorities as cultural barriers to modernization and wealth. This section looks at 3 structural mechanisms of access: labor, market and knowledge/information, and capital.

Land restitution reforms were followed by a retreat of the state from providing services and welfare to rural areas which encouraged migration to urban areas (Mikulcak et al., 2015). After the EU accession, Romania became a major source of cheap migrant labor for the Western industrial agricultural complex (Cosma et al., 2020) which further exacerbated rural-out migration. As mentioned in the following quote by one of the public officials in Village B, the promise of higher pay affects seasonal migration patterns.

Traditional small-scale animal husbandry is a labor-intensive activity, depending on the product type and production methods. Milk and dairy production are more time- and labor-demanding than, for example, raising animals for meat.

For the farmers who decide to continue with traditional dairy practices, extended family and community ties remain essential in case of labor shortages. In both villages, farmers reported relying on family members regularly or cooperating with other farmers in the community, especially in the context of large-scale works, sharing machinery, and manpower.

The livestock farmer in Village A and the shepherd in Village B process the raw milk on-farm, selling cheese as their main product. Despite offering a niche, high-quality product, most small-scale livestock farmers are constrained by the lack of infrastructure, certificates (Figure 4), and costs of commercialization coupled with artificially low prices for their products and choose therefore to sell sporadically on traditional farmers’ markets (târg; piaţă agro-alimentară), opting for informal distribution through their kin networks. The absence of essential infrastructure such as market spaces, particularly in Village B, hampers farmers’ possibilities for direct consumer sales. Some farmers in Village A, despite recording lower sales compared to the city market, prefer to use the village public-market infrastructure to save on expenses, even though it lacks basic food safety facilities.

Farmers and public administrators alike acknowledge the cumbersome bureaucracy that small-scale farmers face. While attempting to complete paperwork and administrative processes, as the quote below suggests, some feel that their files are left to languish in the bureaucratic chain, amplifying the perception that they are marginalized compared to larger firms that seem to receive more support from public authorities.

As a result, small-scale dairy farmers are increasingly turning to intermediaries to sell their products due to the challenges posed by bureaucratic processes (Figure 4) and infrastructure limitations. This practice often results in the extraction of local raw materials for luxury food products destined for foreign markets. Oftentimes, local producers face fluctuating farm gate prices, while local consumers may be denied access to such products. In Village B, farmers who opt for adaptation to global market demand, such as Angus production, face their set of challenges. They often lack the technology and infrastructure required to compete on a global scale. This issue is exemplified by the need to sell livestock to multinational companies that have the necessary means for export.

Public administrators and local authorities suggest that these farmers possess the necessary know-how but often lack the means or motivation to access markets. There’s a tacit consensus among public administrators that creating producer associations based on specific activities (e.g., crops, animals, vegetables) empowers farmers by providing collective bargaining power. However, as exemplified by the case of Village A, the lack of trust and transparency hinders such formal networks from emerging. Besides the socialist terminology that evokes the experiences of communist institutions, it is also the post-socialist failures to address resource grabbing and corruption that contribute to the reputation of such associations.

Grasslands and pastures serve as symbolic spaces where supranational, national, and local policies converge and exert direct or indirect influence on foodscapes. In the European context, the legal control and use of land for agricultural purposes offer opportunities to access capital in the form of subsidies. The allocation and terms of these subsidies for small-scale farmers vary based on factors such as location (high-nature value or not), product type, and animal breed. The EU’s CAP administers direct support subsidy packages under Pillar I, with payments distributed per animal and per hectare. These are often the most accessible subsidies, as the bureaucratic requirements are minimal and farmers frequently receive assistance from town halls or associations in securing them. Under Pillar II, eco-scheme payments are designated for farmers in ecologically relevant areas who can substantiate their eligibility. Other economic support packages within rural development schemes face structural barriers, including land ownership structure and farm size. While the actual impact of direct agricultural support on farm income remains challenging to assess, EU subsidies undeniably represent a significant source of financial backing for farmers. For instance, one livestock farmer from Village B noted:

In general, public officials in the study areas view the introduction of EU subsidies as a positive force that stimulates interest in agriculture and is reversing land abandonment which became a problem after the land reforms in 1989. However, the ability to benefit from subsidies depends on the scale of operations and the knowledge of farmers about such subsidies and their capacity to navigate the application process. Focusing on scale excludes a large part of the agricultural holdings from being able to access direct support. As for requesting compensations for ecosystem services as in the case of wildlife compensation and agri-environmental measures (Pillar II), farmers report a high degree of bureaucratic complexity as a barrier to applying for support. Additionally, while providing substantial financial benefits for the protection of the ecosystem, eco-schemes imply additional paperwork and unrealistic expectations, for example, “delayed” grazing times. Yet, while bureaucracy is perceived as a knowledge/information-related barrier by farmers, this same barrier is interpreted as a cultural barrier by local public administrators.

Nevertheless, the extent to which these subsidies cover the costs required to maintain traditional production practices remains a subject of debate. For instance, in Village B, traditional dairy production is becoming less economically viable due to higher costs of commercialization, and the promise of higher incomes leads farmers to reorient themselves toward raising Angus cattle. As a livestock dairy farmer from Village B explained:

However, as pointed out by a new entrant in the Angus business, transitioning to Angus farming is not feasible for small-scale farmers due to the significant upfront investment and a longer time horizon to break even. As highlighted by an Angus farmer:

The challenges faced by small-scale farmers in Romanian villages resonate with key themes in the FS literature and reiterate previous knowledge about small-holder access to so-called territorial markets (Civil Society Mechanism [CSM], 2016) expanding on it from the perspective of a post-socialist European country context. FS is a concept that emphasizes the rights of peoples and communities to define their own food and agriculture systems. Who these actors are and under what circumstances they are sovereign are a few of the main unresolved questions in the literature (Wittman, 2011; Edelman et al., 2014; Iles and Montenegro de Wit, 2015; Schiavoni, 2015, 2017). The Romanian case shows that access to land for food production is embedded in a contradictory bundle of institutions and power relations produced across time and space. Romanian legal property regimes, as part of this bundle, are an assemblage of old and new regulatory mechanisms, dynamics, and changes. These intertwined processes are produced through the interplay between agents at multiple levels (supranational, national, and local) operating as individuals or within collective institutions (e.g., livestock associations), through a diversity of relationships (e.g., familiar and community ties), embodying different strategies of access. We relied on the Theory of Access (Ribot and Peluso, 2009) to conceptually disentangle this bundle of power relations and understand the role of communal institutions in the land–food nexus, from a FS perspective while identifying leverage points for an agroecological transition. More specifically we started the research with two questions: What are the implications of communal pastures for land access and how does commoning relate to FS in Romania? How do mechanisms of access influence food transitions and FS?

In contemporary, post-socialist Romania, land under communal pasture can be either state property or the private property of individual users. Municipalities, through elected local councillors, delegate rights of use and access through tenure agreements. Local councillors decide on the rent and duration of the lease. The benefits livestock farmers derive from the pasture are direct access to input-like resources (fodder, space for grazing, land in general) as well as throughput-like (subsidies) and output-like (food) resources. However, access to these resources, especially to land, is neither straightforwardly established nor equally distributed. Entanglements between explicit/formal mechanisms (livestock associations) and implicit/informal ones (information and networks) enable actors to control access to land. For example, in the case of Village A, the existence of a livestock association to mediate lease agreements between the town hall and the farmers allowed people without livestock to secure access to the pasture which led to open confrontations among members. Simultaneously, despite being regarded as beneficial by state authorities, the associations often operate in a regulatory void which generates conflicts and legitimacy problems, as in the livestock association in the case of Village A.

To answer the second part of the first question, that is, the relation between land commoning and FS, we relied on the concept of quiet sovereignty (Visser et al., 2015). Indeed, if we understand FS as a social movement (Schiavoni, 2015), with explicit political goals, then except for EcoRuralis, the other actors followed during the fieldwork are not moved in their everydayness by a political goal. They rather resist global pressures in a “quiet” way, for example, by keeping an agroecological mode of food production or adapting to barriers to markets, capital, and technology through informal, familiar-ties-based market networks. In reporting about their “everyday” struggle, they do not communicate a willingness to be part of a public, overtly political struggle, often the opposite. They aspire to a quiet, decent everydayness and to experience this without the constant anxiety of precarious access to labor, capital, and infrastructure. Limited access to these basic needs threatens their quality of life, and their future expectations, forcing new generations to move to the city and farmers to abandon their agroecological practice.

As for the second question, our results reiterate scholars’ idea (Ribot and Peluso, 2009; McGinlay et al., 2017) that there are other ways actors benefit from a resource, not only through legally established rights but also through power relations within and between resource systems. Ultimately, for livestock farmers to maintain access to pastures, they must be able to participate in economic exchanges to obtain capital for rents. Strategies employed by small-scale farmers are often at the edge of legality and access to the formal market proves more difficult and less rewarding than operating on the informal market or accessing land for subsidies. Meanwhile, representatives of local municipalities share the conviction that the biggest barrier to the “emancipation” of small-scale farmers is their reluctance to participate in the formal market economy. What is not acknowledged in local and national policy circles is the power asymmetries between the local, national, and international markets and how they affect the viability of small-scale farming, leaving peasant farmers with few opportunities to compete in formal market structures, including local agri-food markets. Rather than being regarded as a backward practice, informal markets contain transformative elements that actively serve FS ambitions to localize markets.

As an underlining principle, FS promotes territorial markets (CSM, 2016), as a means to enhance food security, support local economies, and ensure that the benefits of food production remain within the community (Nyéléni Declaration on Food Sovereignity, 2007; Nyéléni Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology, 2015). The capacity of small-scale farmers to be food sovereign is understood here as having control over productive means and being able to engage in food provisioning and exchange. Direct local sales, food sharing, and gifts not only respond to the real needs of producers and consumers but are crucial for the decommodification of food. Through these “everyday acts of resistance” (or quiet sovereignty), livestock farmers construct an alternative but precarious food system outside commodity markets.

When thinking of alternatives in food production and land governance we need to be cautious about essentialization and rather take the underpinning dilemmas into proper account. Communal practices are not a panacea but, at the same time, agroecology, as a core component of FS, is constantly threatened within a neoliberal system. Everyday resistance and quiet sovereignty, as any form of radical practice, are anti-systemic, challenging hegemonic values of competitiveness and profitability. Yet, to make it a concrete alternative, enhancing at the same time the power and rights of peasant communities, it is necessary to look at access mechanisms not only as individual but as a collective ability. This requires a political project and a political commitment, therefore engaging with FS not only “quietly” but also through collective action and coalition building, for example as a member of a social movement. This coalition-oriented/political dimension is something neglected in both access theory (Ribot and Peluso, 2009) and commons literature.

Understood as a quiet form of sovereignty, that is, everyday resistance, FS in the investigated contexts has proven crucial to preserving and reproducing the counter-systemic practices of agroecological food production. However, our findings suggest they could not be enough to resist the penetration of neoliberal practices, like land grabbing and the industrialization of food production. Social and political movements are necessary elements to exert collective power and prevent dispossession. On the other hand, in the context of a post-socialist country with 50 years of dictatorship behind it, ideas of collective movement are associated with violence and disenfranchisement. Future research has to investigate further the Romanian state-society interfaces and how to turn them into a driver rather than a barrier for agroecological food transitions.

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, Ana-Maria Gătejel. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

The supplemental files for this article can be found as follows:

Tables S1–S2. Docx.

The authors thank Atilla Szocs from EcoRuralis for his involvement in the conception of the research. They thank in advance the two reviewers and the editors of this special issue for their helpful comments and revision suggestions.

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Contributed to conception, review, data collection, drafting, editing, and revising of the research and manuscript: A-MG.

Contributed to review, drafting, editing, and revising of the manuscript: AM.

How to cite this article: Gătejel, A-M, Maiello, A. 2024. Commoning, access, and sovereignty: Disentangling land–food relations in the case of peasant livestock farmers in Romania. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00060

Domain Editor-in-Chief: Alastair Iles, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Guest Editor: Sylvia Kay, The Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Knowledge Domain: Sustainability Transitions

Part of an Elementa Special Feature: Land and Sustainable Food Transformations