Collective Land Tenures and processes of mountain territorialisation. Insights from the Italian Central Apennines

Mountains are mostly portrayed as empty, abandoned, or in decline. Yet these supposedly vacant territories are dense with institutional legacies and living practices of coexistence through collective land governance systems. This dissertation develops a geographically grounded understanding of such collective land tenures. It engages with legal and historical approaches while remaining attentive to territory, ecology, and power relations. Starting from mountain regions in a context of polycrisis, it treats abandonment not as a natural outcome but as the product of specific political and territorial choices, and asks how collective land institutions, as already-existing alternatives, persist and are reconfigured within it. The guiding research question is: How are collective land tenures reconfigured in contemporary mountain areas, and what forms, functions, and relational power relations emerge through processes of (re)territorialisation? Scholarship on collective land institutions has approached them through historical, legal, and institutional lenses, framing them either as legacies of the past or as normative governance models. Only recently have socio-anthropological and geographical contributions begun to explore their territorial and relational dimensions. Drawing on feminist political ecology and legal geography, this thesis conceptualises collective land institutions as territorially embedded socio-ecological infrastructures, capable of producing or constraining care, access, exclusion, and conflict. Territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation constitute its central analytical lens. The research focuses on the montagne di mezzo of the Central Apennines, an ecoregion marked by depopulation, seismic disruption, institutional fragmentation, and contested habitability, where a plurality of collective land institutions persists. By approaching the Apennines as "an other mountain", distinct from the Alps, the thesis expands the geography of knowledge on mountain commons. Methodologically, the research combines long-term immersive fieldwork, participatory action research, critical cartography, mobile and place-based ethnography, interviews, and data analysis. Methods vary across chapters but share a relational, situated, and co-productive posture. The thesis comprises six chapters. Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical framework, examining the forms collective land tenures take today in the ecological stewardship of mountain territories. Chapter 2 presents context and methodology, using critical cartography to show how overlapping territorialisation strategies produce differentiated visibility and marginalisation of collective land institutions. Three empirical chapters follow a South-to-North trajectory. Chapter 3 investigates network-driven territorialisation under residual municipal management, where fragmented forest commons intersect with ecosystem-services debates. Chapter 4 analyses conservation-led deterritorialisation in the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park, where persistent institutions mediate use and non-use within fragile polycentric co-governance. Chapter 5 examines post-disaster, project-led reterritorialisation along the Marche–Abruzzo border, where comunanze agrarie are repositioned within wood value-chain strategies, between commodification and self-determination. Chapter 6 synthesises the findings and discusses their value as a comparative framework for mountain commons beyond the study area. The thesis argues that collective land tenures are neither historical residuals nor ready-made utopias, but contested, living infrastructures whose political survival depends on their capacity to inhabit ambivalence between self-determination and market co-optation. Their future, however, is also threatened from within: gender asymmetries, leadership entrenchment, and untransmitted collective memory risk turning commons into exclusionary club goods. By repositioning collective land institutions as contemporary territorial actors, the thesis contributes to economic and human geography, political ecology, and critical commons studies, and offers place-sensitive insights for rural development, conservation, and post-disaster planning. Above all, it shows that where collective lands are maintained, ecological restoration cannot be separated from habitability, nor from the continued presence of communities in their stewardship. Mountains, in this view, are not the margins of territorial transformation but the vantage point from which to read it.