Customary commons make up more than half of all alpine pastureland in Austria. These persistent pre-capitalist institutions of communal land use have long been incorporated into the legal and administrative frameworks of the modern Austrian state, which in turn are shaped by the predominance of private property relations. Focusing on collective alps in Tyrol and Salzkammergut, this study explores the lingering friction between practices of collective ownership and their formal recognition. Combining ethnographic and historical research with critical property theory, it shows that even highly regulated commons continue to operate through locally embedded, relationship-based modes of care and governance that fundamentally diverge from the liberal ideal of exclusive and absolute disposition over things. By following the ambivalent effects of the commons’ juridification, it dwells on the possibilities and limits of sustaining alternatives to private property within capitalist legal structures.

Lisa Francesca Rail is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Her current research concerns contemporary pasture commons in the Austrian Alps and the ambivalent effects of their legal formalization by the modern Austrian state. From 2021 to 2026, she was a doctoral fellow of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Prior to that, she spent several summers working as a herder and cheesemaker on collective alpine pastures herself and had already conducted research on grazing commons in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan as part of her MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology at McGill University in Montréal. She is also the editor of the recent reissue of Der Kampf um Wald und Weide (lit.: the struggle over woods and pastures) by the Austro-Marxist theorist Otto Bauer and writes regularly for agrarian activist and farming media.