Abstract

The brown bear reintroduction program in the Pyrenees was launched in 1996, once their population was considered extinct in the central parts of the mountain range. The increasing number of livestock casualties caused by bear attacks forced the public administrations to adopt a package of protection measures, which included hiring mountain shepherds to tend the local farmers' flocks during the summer grazing season. Although these measures were deemed to restore age-old communal shepherding practices that had recently been abandoned by bringing together bears, livestock, and shepherds in the high mountain pastures, the bear program has produced an overlap of communal and state-driven territorialities. Drawing attention to the ambiguous position of mountain shepherds within a new pastoralism-conservation network, situated between local farmers and bear program's decision-makers, this article argues that the commons must be taken into consideration as it persists in current times, even within a high-modern territoriality unfolded under different forms of environmentality. The shepherds epitomize the hybridization of different territorialities, situated on the edge of the production-based economy developed by the local farmers and the amenity-based economy behind the bear reintroduction program. There is a shared, though differentiated capitalist view of natural resources. Using the main theories of power in political ecology and taking the variables of 'format, management, governance, and institution' to frame the commons as an enduring local collective farming resource, this article scrutinizes the collision between the two types of capitalism, usually misidentified as a rural-urban divide. It also shows the extent to which the shifting existence of the commons, crystallized through the ambiguous position of the shepherds, may provide us with a fruitful toolkit to better understanding human-wildlife conflicts based on the cleavage between farming and conservationist sectors.

Keywords: Brown bear, Bundle of rights, Commons, Environmentality, Pastoralism, Pyrenees, Types of capitalism, Territorialization

How to Cite:

Pons-Raga, F., (2024) “A political ecology of shifting commons in the Pyrenees: Shepherds on the edge of production and amenity-based capitalism after the reintroduction of bears”, Journal of Political Ecology 31(1), 295–313. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5864