Polge, Etienne

In this communication, we propose to reassess the role of protected geographical indications (GIs) as “territorial commons”, defined as a set of shared collective natural and immaterial resources used by a supporting the specific GIs agroecosystems and coproduced by a community of actors at territorial and landscape levels. A number of recent studies have emphasized the parallel between the specific collective organization of GIs systems and the seminal analysis developed by Elinor Ostrom (1990) on governing the commons, and most recent development with the new commons (Hess and Ostrom, 2007) and the sustainability of social ecological systems (Ostrom 2009). As a matter of fact, the definition of terroir, as adopted by the OIV (2010) and defined by INAO, provide strong and closed connection with the governance of commons, as defined by Ostrom (1990, 2009) combining both biophysical factors and shared cultural and knowledge resources developed by local communities (Mazé 2023).
First applied to the governance of specific natural resources, such as water, prairies, forest, their extension to more complex agroecosystems, combining different territorial material and immaterial resources at landscape level, we first propose a methodological and analytical extension of the IAD/SES framework (Ostrom 2009, McGinnis and Ostrom 2014)to analyze the sustainability of complex GIs agroecosystems both at landscape level and to capture from a dynamic and processual analysis of past and current transformations in the context of agroecological transitions and global climate changes. By considering GIs agroecosystems as dynamic social-ecological systems (SES), our analysis emphasizes the different models of territorial and ecological embeddedness supporting GIs in France and the trade-offs faces in supporting the development of biodiversity-based agriculture. The methodology and analytical extensions proposed are illustrated by a few number case studies of French GIs that, there is no unique way of characterizing biodiversity-based agroecological model for GIs. Understanding this diversity is a crucial step in relation to their territorial embeddedness at landscape level, as well as reassessing the specific links between GIs products and their terroir.