Doctoral Dissertation Research: Returning the Commons: Resource Access and Environmental Governance in Southern Colorado

Syracuse University, Syracuse NY

Investigators

Abstract

In 2002 the Colorado Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent in Lobato v. Taylor by awarding the heirs of original Sangre de Cristo Land Grant settlers access rights to a roughly 80,000 acre tract of land that had long been private property and closed to usufructuary rights. This land was formerly the multi-use commons area of the grant, located in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado, but like the commons of other land grants in Colorado and New Mexico, had been legally closed off to traditional uses for nearly 150 years. The court created a new form of resource access by combining private property with the communal patterns of land ownership and use in Spanish and Mexican land grant traditions. Doctoral student Keith Lindner, under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Perreault at Syracuse University will investigate the impacts of returned access to former common land, and the concurrent construction of locally-based institutions and norms to govern resource access and use. The project asks two central questions. First, what institutions and norms are being constructed to govern resource access and use, and what factors are shaping their emergence? Second, what significance does newly expanded resource access have for livelihoods, economic practices, and cultural meanings? The implementation of Lobato raises important questions for geographic literature on environmental governance, livelihoods, economic strategies, and cultural meanings among land-dependent communities. By systematically documenting the institutions and processes of environmental governance in the San Luis Valley, the project will investigate the role of law and local participation in environmental management; changing livelihood strategies; migration patterns; the viability and persistence of subsistence- and communally-oriented activities in a market economy; and changing cultural meanings and identities. The research employs multiple methodologies, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, focus group workshops, and household surveys. Extensive fieldwork will be conducted in the San Luis Valley, CO, with archival research in Alamosa and Denver, CO and Santa Fe, NM. This research will produce scientific knowledge on a new form of resource access and its socio-economic and cultural implications, addressing important questions on the connections between resource access, environmental governance, rural livelihoods, and community change. The primary significance of this research lies in the documentation and evaluation of a new form of resource access in the San Luis Valley that attempts to combine private property with usufructuary rights to common property. This new institutional form is potentially significant for other underrepresented groups, particularly Native American and Hispano communities in the U.S. Southwest, who seek land and natural resource rights. A full documentation and analysis of this form of resource access will benefit and offer lessons to communities and land managers who aspire to manage lands according to multiple uses through a combination of private property and usufructuary rights. Further, the proposed research will benefit policymaking on local environmental governance arrangements, particularly in situations of management for multiple uses and in rural communities where desires exist to exercise subsistence-based usufructuary rights. Documentation and analysis of the new form of resource access in San Luis will help decision makers evaluate the extent to which such an institutional form would be useful in other contexts.