“Back to the future? Commons as a normality in the past and a social innovation in the present”: What is there to learn from historical commons in these times where so many citizens across Europe are desperately looking for organising in a different way? Are there reasons to be positive about the potential of such institutions for collective action and are there ways to take historical concepts as guiding principles for our future societies?
Prof. Tine De Moor (°Ghent, 1975) holds a PhD in History from Ghent University (2003) and a postgraduate in Environmental Sciences at the University of Antwerp (1999). Tine De Moor is full professor Social Enterprise and Institutions for Collective action at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. In December 2012, she was appointed professor of Institutions for Collective Action in historical perspective at the Faculty of Humanities, Department of History & Art History at Utrecht University, a position she held until her transfer to RSM. Tine De Moor conducts research into the creation, functioning and evolution of cooperative social enterprises/institutions for collective action, past and present, from the early modern period in Europe until today. Institutions for collective action are forms of organizations formed from below, by the immediate stakeholders, with the aim of working together to pursue both personal (material) and societal interests. Issues that have been studied by her research team are the many energy and care cooperatives that have developed over the past decennia, the initiatives of citizens involved in short chain food supply, the formation of platform cooperatives and the renewal of the mutual as a form of insurance for the self-employed. Besides this she has been researching labour market participation and household formation patterns over the past millennium, and she has been actively involved in developing innovative research methods, through, for example, several Citizen Science Projects. She has been president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons and has set-up the peer-reviewed International Journal of the Commons, and she acts as expert in several national and international boards and projects. In the past 10 years, she received several large research grants (ERC Starting Grant, NWO-VIDI and VICI).
