From 16 to 20 June, representatives of Social Enterprises & Institutions for Collective Action were present on the 20th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). On 16 June, our research group organized the session ‘Common concerns. Environmental literacy among commoners in early modern Europe’, chaired by Marianne Groep-Foncke.  

Looking at three entirely different cases from Navarre, Spain, affiliate researcher Dr. José-Miguel Lana Berasain (Public University of Navarre) highlighted the emergence of innovative protocols to control precious resources such as wood and water. Dr. Dilek Ozkan Pantazis (The Cyprus Institute) took the audience to Southeast Europe, explaining how regulations from the Ottoman administration changed the traditional relationships with nature, balancing the growing demand for resources due to early industrialization. To conclude, Marianne Groep-Foncke (RSM, Erasmus University) zoomed in on the century-long strife between brewers and bleachers near the city of Haarlem (Holland), to explain the challenges of transboundary water governance. 

On 17 June, Marianne presented a paper together with Tine De Moor about studying historical environmental self-governance with the Institutional Grammar and Large Language Models (LLMs). The paper goes into our explorations with applying Large Language Models to the qualitative coding of rule sets, working towards a low-treshold coding protocol that can be used by every researcher, including those that are not overly tech-minded. The paper highlights the steps that have to be taken when working with a generic LLM, and the limitations and pitfalls that should be taken into account.