People have always lived together in communities, some smaller, some larger. Really small communities will not have formal associations beyond the kinship group that ties its members together. The termlocal community refers to two quite different but related phenomena. First, it is a group of people who share language, customs, and history. If small in size, say not much more then 20/30 to 70/100 people (Corning and Hines, 1988, p. 146;
Hallpike, 1986, p. 5; Mann, 1986a, p. 42; Masters, 1983, p. 161; Service, 1967, p. 111), such local communities are referred to as bands. Up to roughly 10,000 BCE the band was the dominant type of organization among the nomadic hunter-gatherers (Flannery, 1972, p. 401). Bands may contain
various kinship structures (families, lineages, clans: in that order) and other sub-groups (such as secret societies, cults) (Liverani, 2006). They can be part of a larger, culturally determined whole, but generally living indepen- dently (see below: cf. Dunbar, 1993). The !Kung of the Kalahari desert are a good example. Bands generally do not have political institutions that are authorized and/or legitimized by a higher authority. They do have, though, institutions of their own. When bigger in size, say, beyond 150–500 people (Mann, 1986a, p. 143), the termtribeis considered more appropriate. These are generally governed by a rudimentary political arrangement such as a council of elders. Tribes can become part of a larger whole, a chiefdom (or paramountcy), yet may live their lives pretty much separately.
Once the population in these local communities grows beyond the size where face-to-face interaction between all members is no longer feasible, and thus has become an imagined community (Anderson, 2006; compare Anderson’s concept with that of Bertrand Russell’s “artificially created societies,”1962, p. 203), local communities tend to formalize their associa- tional life in order to establish accepted modes of interaction for settling collective problems (see Table 2.1). In this second sense, local communities encompass an entire town population (for instance, municipality, city-state) while specific sections of that population may have associations of their own as well (for example, a church denomination, a craft or merchant guild, farmers managing an irrigation system,fisherman sharingfishing rights).
It is also possible that the local institutional arrangement merely concerns the management of the natural resource upon which the population depends for its livelihood. In that case the local association is a pure common pool resource management (CPR) system. At some point they can be enveloped by larger political entities, yet remain more or less independent (as was the case with Dutch water boards until the late eighteenth century). Whether specific-purpose local associations actually developed into general-purpose political communities that provided and/
or managed more than one service or natural resource is a matter that requires further research.1
Local associations can become part of a more formalized chiefdom without limiting the autonomy of the local units (Spencer, 1990, p. 7) or they can become a city-state with 1,000 up to 100,000 people (in a few cases more) where villages lose their political autonomy to a unifying political
1One example that comes to mind is the institutional arrangements for water manage- ment in the Low Countries that preceded the emergence of villages, towns, and municipalities.
structure (Sanderson, 2001, p. 312). At that point the local political community and the various associations serve as the backbone of an upper-local (regional, and possibly even supraregional) political regime and become the default option when the upper-local polity is in decline.
People nowadays tend to think of local communities as formalized local governments that have jurisdictional boundaries and are part of a larger political regime and sovereignty upon which they are dependent to a smaller or larger degree. These local governments are the backbone of upper-local regimes because their populations supply thefinancial, natural, and human resources needed to support upper-local regimes. How impor- tant they are is illustrated by the fact that an upper-local (can be city-state/
microstate, or regional, or supraregional/macrostate) government that fails to incorporate the local community or governance structures is often destined to disintegrate as shown by the fate of various Mesopotamian polities and, more recently, of African colonies that were governed through indirect rule, of the former Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union. If and when an upper-local political regime dissolves, the local associations are left to run their own affairs, at least for a time.
TABLE 2.1. TYPES OF GOVERNING ASSOCIATIONS
Familial Jurisdictional
Local Band, tribe; families, lineages, clans, age grades, secret societies, cults
Village, town, municipality, city- state (microstate2); CPR- management system; craft and merchant guilds; local interest groups, fraternities; organized religion (church, parish, monastery); homeowners associations; sports clubs, etc.
Upper-local Chiefdom Chiefdom (paramountcy); regional government (province, city- state); state (macrostate);
regional and national interest groups; labor unions; organized religion (bishopric, archbishopric)
2The distinction between microstates (i.e., city-states) and macrostates (that is, territo- rial or national states; see Trigger, 2003) is from Hansen (2000a, pp. 15–16).
It is clear that several types of formal local government can be distin- guished based on the range of their services, on the extent to which their political institutions are representative of the population, and on the extent to which citizen initiative is allowed and respectively encouraged. General- purpose local governments, such as municipalities, provide a wide range of services, while specific-purpose local governments offer one service or manage one resource only. In many countries, general-purpose governments are the most common and, generally, more numerous than specific- purpose governments. The United States is an exception with its approxi- mately 40,000 specific-purpose governments and 40,000 general-purpose governments (Ostrom et al., 1988), representing a dramatic reduction of both general- and specific-purpose governments in the past 50–100 years.
In some Western countries specific-purpose governments are returning (for instance, garbage-collection regions in the Netherlands). Some of these general- and specific-purpose governments represent the local population at large, while others only represent a portion of the popula- tion (see Table 2.2).
To understand the role and position of local associations in the emergence and evolution of upper-local political regimes, it is necessary to look beyond the formal local, subnational government units and include local communities, such as bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, that encompass the entire membership as well as those local associations that share governance with the formal local government in the sense that they provide a rule structure for a subcategory of the local community. These subcate- gories include (see Table 2.1) common pool resource (CPR) management systems, craft and merchant guilds, organized religion, and any other type of local associations.
TABLE 2.2. TYPES OF FORMAL LOCAL (I.E., SUBNATIONAL) GOVERNMENTS
General purpose Specific purpose Representative Municipalities, counties,
provinces
U.S. school boards; Dutch water boards after the 1980s; CPRs
Nonrepresentative Districts (e.g., in France) CPRs; Dutch water boards before the 1980s