When the State Imposes the “Commons”: Pastoralism After the Reintroduction of the Brown Bear in the Pyrenees

After the brown bear reintroduction program was launched in the Pyrenees in 1996, the French and Spanish States fostered and funded a regrouping policy to protect the sheep flocks from the bear attacks. Drawing on a comparative analysis between two Catalan districts in north-eastern Spain (Val d’Aran and Pallars Sobirà) and the Ariège district in south-western France, this article scrutinises the extent to which the transformation of shepherding practices induced by the renewed presence of bears can be deemed as a return of the ‘commons’ to the Pyrenees. The emergence of public regrouped herds resembles an old and until then abandoned pastoral format, the communal herd. However, this iteration of collective action is promoted and tightly controlled by the State, whereas previously, local farmers used to manage the old communal system themselves. The regrouping policy mimics the morphology of locally generated models following historical property rights logic, while incorporating a modern form of public governmentality. The conceptualisation of property as a bundle of rights and the two ethnographic studies serve to critically engage with the notion of the commons and their return. The literature on environmentality and territorialisation allows us to read this State-driven policy through the lenses of imposition and dispossession.