The CoCon Observatory is the empirical backbone of CoCon: a provenance-rich longitudinal corpus of institutional rules from c.1000 CE to the present, spanning commons, guilds, cooperatives, mutuals, intentional communities and contemporary citizen collectives. Its comparative core—the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Spain—combines exceptionally rich archival series with contrasting institutional histories. CoCon will integrate deep longitudinal trajectories, in which successive regulations allow rules to be followed through persistence, modification, recombination and disappearance, with broader contextual cases that establish how widely rules recur across periods, places and organisational forms. Together, these will yield an estimated 120,000–150,000 coded institutional statements, complemented by a small number of strategically selected transmission and challenge cases beyond the European core.
This scale is essential to CoCon’s central question. Similar rules appearing in different organisations or periods do not by themselves demonstrate institutional continuity: they may reflect inheritance, borrowing or independent responses to similar problems. The Observatory provides the combination of longitudinal depth and comparative breadth needed to distinguish these explanations systematically. Provenance is therefore as important as volume: every rule remains linked to its organisation, document, date and historical context, while a Year-1 source audit determines which cases can support claims about genealogy and which provide evidence for recurrence, context and convergence.
CoCon builds this infrastructure on substantial existing expertise rather than from scratch. The CommonRules project has demonstrated how large bodies of historical regulations can be transformed into comparable rule-level data and has already revealed shared long-term patterns across Institutions for Collective Action. CollectieveKracht and CROWN provide extensive experience in identifying, classifying and building research infrastructures around historical and contemporary collective organisations, using the SICADE framework to establish comparability across organisational forms. Finally, the team’s extensive archival research—including the systematic source-mapping approach demonstrated in the Impact Explorer work—provides the expertise to locate dispersed sources, assess provenance and documentary continuity, and recognise gaps and survivorship bias. The Observatory thus combines proven methods, existing data and infrastructure, and deep archival expertise at a scale that makes CoCon’s new tests of institutional transmission and convergence possible
Relevant publications
Common Rules Database
- De Moor, T., Laborda-Pemán, M., Lana-Berasain, J. M., van Weeren, R., & Winchester, A. (2016). “Ruling the Commons: Introducing a New Methodology for the Analysis of Historical Commons.” International Journal of the Commons, 10(2), 529–588.
Developed the comparative methodology for extracting and analysing institutional rules from long-running historical commons. - Farjam, M., De Moor, T., van Weeren, R., et al. (2020). “Shared Patterns in Long-Term Dynamics of Commons as Institutions for Collective Action.” International Journal of the Commons, 14(1), 78–90.
Identified recurring patterns in the long-term evolution of institutional rules using longitudinal historical data. - Forsman, A., De Moor, T., van Weeren, R., et al. (2020). “Eco-Evolutionary Perspectives on Emergence, Dispersion and Dissolution of Historical Dutch Commons.” PLoS ONE, 15(7), e0236471.
Analysed the emergence, spread and disappearance of Dutch commons over the longue durée. - Forsman, A., De Moor, T., van Weeren, R., et al. (2021). “Comparisons of Historical Dutch Commons Inform about the Long-Term Dynamics of Social-Ecological Systems.” PLoS ONE, 16(8), e0256803.
Demonstrated the analytical potential of systematically comparing long historical trajectories of commons. - De Moor, T., Farjam, M., van Weeren, R., et al. (2021). “Taking Sanctioning Seriously: The Impact of Sanctions on the Resilience of Historical Commons in Europe.” Journal of Rural Studies, 87, 181–188.
Connected specific institutional rules to the long-term resilience of historical commons.
Participatory archiving and archival challenges
- De Herde, V., & De Moor, T. (2025). “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Organizational Galaxy: Overcoming Challenges of Data Aggregation over Time and Space.” Management & Organizational History.
Addresses the methodological challenges of constructing comparable organisational datasets across long periods and geographical contexts. - De Herde, V., & De Moor, T. (2026). “Cooperative Data in a Comparative Perspective: Avoiding Pitfalls for Robust Data Aggregation.” In Global Cooperative Economics and Movements. Routledge.
Develops methods for robust aggregation and comparison of heterogeneous cooperative data. - Vink, J., De Moor, T., Groep-Foncke, M. (2026) “Knowledge exchange to build the memory of Dutch citizen collectives as part of the CollectieveKracht platform.” Open research report.