Tseligkato, an institution for the governance of grazing lands: a case study

Abstract

Meadows and grazing lands constitute typical examples of common pool resources in open access, facing substantial degradation problems in today’s Greece. This is due to the lack of a credible institutional framework (or ‘governance structure’) that allocates clear property rights to interested parties and provides mechanisms for policing and enforcing them. The historical institution of tseligato constituted such a governance structure that enabled sustainable management and successful conservation of grazing lands in Greece for about four hundred years. The current paper comes to shed light on the structure and workings of tseligato, drawing on interviews with those who practiced the institution in Patoulia Argithea until its demised at the late ’60s.