Owners of a common heritage. commons, environment and rights in european mountains (18th - 20th century)
The OCHER project investigates the relation between in-context historical forms of collective management of lands and resources and their current environmental and landscape value, triggering a reflection on the accessibility rights to natural resources for future generations.
Following the Habitats Directive, whose aim is to promote natural habitats taking account of local requirements, 8 sites in 4 different European countries, selected from the Natura 2000 list, are chosen as case studies in a comparative perspective. The research addresses different kinds of “institutions for collective action”, at different scales in rural areas. Here conservation and sustainable use of the environment are centred on ""people working with nature"" and minimal forms of organisation are mainly households. Therefore, a combined historical, anthropological and juridical approach is needed to achieve: 
•	a better understanding of the long-term effects and resilience of resource use in the environment; 
•	a deeper reflection on the specificity of collective subjects and on the mechanisms of collective legal actions and institutions. 
OCHER will also address the issue published by the Council of Europe in “Protecting future generations trough commons”, which features the project’s objective outlines with preeminent questions such as: 
•	What do we inherit from past generations from a cultural and environmental point of view? 
•	What is at stake in the environmental issues of the present? 
•	What can collective institutions teach us from an environmental perspective?
OCHER aims to contribute, with a multidisciplinary research, to the reflection on a new environmental right, that goes beyond the dichotomy man/nature, trying to understand the historical forms of a non-destructive, nor extractive, relation of interdependence in social and ecological systems. It also addresses the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and intends to take action by means of its research outcomes