Communities after markets. The long road of winemakers to self-governance in post-communist Hungary

•Community governance of common-pool resources is rare in post-communist Europe.•Links between market institutions and self-governance are modelled.•The joint institutional dynamics of markets and producer communities are explored.•Transitional absence of market institutions hindered self-governance.•Contrary to literature, bottom-up self-governance is now feasible in the region. The performance of post-communist countries in building institutions for self-governance by users of common-pool resources has been meagre. While previous studies have emphasised weak social capital and bad policies, we focus on the dynamic effect of market institutions on self-organisation. We argue that common-pool resource users who trade their products are more likely to self-organise after private enterprises and their markets are in place. Therefore, the absence of market-supporting institutions was one of the factors that hindered the self-organisation of producers after the collapse of communism. While markets often destroy communities, we detect a positive effect in this geo-historical context. Two case studies about the development of local communities of winemakers in Hungary between 1990 and 2014 illustrate the logic of institutional dynamics.