Common high pasture

Why is the high pasture above a village so often held in common while the fields below it are owned outright?

Walk up out of an Alpine village and the tenure changes under your feet. The kitchen gardens, the hayfields, the arable strips on the valley floor are held by named households, fenced or at least fiercely bounded, bought and sold and inherited. Somewhere above the last barn that stops. The summer pasture belongs to everybody in the village and to nobody in it, and it has usually been that way for as long as anyone kept records.

The tempting reading is that the mountain did it — that height is inhospitable and inhospitable land goes unclaimed. But the alp is not unclaimed. It is claimed intensely, with rules, officers, boundaries, fines and a membership roll. Something chose one form of property for the bottom of the slope and a different one for the top. What was the choice responding to?

Begin with what private property costs. Defining a parcel means agreeing a boundary, marking it, remembering it, and being willing to argue about it. Notice that almost none of that cost scales with what the land produces — a wall around a hectare of rich meadow and a wall around a hectare of thin turf take the same stones. So the cost of exclusive ownership per unit of output rises steeply as yield falls. Below some yield, the boundary costs more than the grass inside it is worth. That alone would explain a limit to enclosure, but it would predict the high ground is simply abandoned, and it is not.

So add the second thing that changes with height, which is variance. Grass on the valley floor comes up every year, on schedule, on your plot. Grass on a massif does not: snow lies late on north faces and burns off early on south ones, and which patch is worth grazing shifts within a season and between years. Ask yourself what a private parcel of that would be. It would be a lottery ticket — excellent some years, worthless in others, and you would have no legal way to reach the part of the mountain that happened to be good.

Common access is the answer to that. It converts many volatile parcels into one averaged one, because the herd can be moved to whatever is growing. That is not generosity; it is risk-pooling, and it is worth more the more variable and the more patchy the resource is.

Then a third pressure: some of the work is indivisible. One herder can watch a hundred cattle nearly as easily as ten, and the path up, the avalanche fence and the summer dairy each serve the whole alp or none of it. Splitting the pasture would not split those costs; it would multiply them.

Now the objection that always arrives here. If everybody may graze, will everybody not overgraze? This is the point at which the historical record contradicts the famous model rather than illustrating it. These pastures are not open to all comers. They are held by a defined corporation of households, with a written roll, elected officers, dated opening days and real fines. And the classic stinting rule is the elegant part: a household may send to the alp only as many animals as it can overwinter on hay from its own private land below. That single rule ties the common right to a private capacity, and it caps summer stocking automatically at whatever the valley can feed through the winter — no census of grass required. The commons and the private fields are not two systems side by side. They are one system, and the lower half meters the upper half.

The mistake to avoid is upgrading "height explains it" into "height causes it". Altitude is a proxy here, not a cause. What actually selects common tenure is a bundle — low yield per hectare, high year-to-year variance, a resource you must move across to use, and shared indivisible infrastructure — and that bundle correlates with height without being height.

Test it away from mountains. The same bundle occurs in fens, moors and inshore fisheries, and common tenure is the historical norm in all of them. Test it in the other direction: a sheltered high basin that mows a reliable hay crop every year is usually owned outright, and it sits above pastures that are not. The elevation did not decide; the yield and the variance did.

And the arrangement is not permanent, which is the strongest evidence that it responds to conditions rather than to terrain. Commons have been dissolved on entirely unchanged ground whenever the calculation moved — by enclosure legislation, by imported winter fodder that broke the link between hay below and cattle above, by ski leases that made the same turf suddenly valuable in winter. The mountain stayed the same shape throughout.

A falsification test, then. If the bundle is doing the work, high pastures that are uniform, compact and easily walled should tend to be privately held, and lowland resources with high variance and high mobility needs should tend to be common. What would refute it: finding that high pastures are held in common even where they are small, even-yielding and cheap to fence, and that no lowland resource with the same variance profile is ever held in common — which would mean altitude, or custom attached to altitude, was the operative variable after all.

• Why the same stinting logic appears in inshore fisheries and irrigation systems that never saw a mountain.
• What happens to the stinting rule once winter fodder can be bought, and whether the commons survives the break.

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