The Swiss mountain village that inspired a Nobel Prize and digital governance

Published on June 20, 2025

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Törbel is a small Swiss mountain village that has attracted the attention of international scientists. Their findings on how mountain farmers utilise water and pastures are shaping the way science addresses collective digital resources today. In 1483, Swiss farmers who lived in a mountain village concluded a contract on water and pasture utilisation. This has proven so sustainable that open-source advocates from the Mozilla Foundation, known for its web browser Firefox, today want to apply the same principles to shared digital resources, or what are called "digital commons" today. How did this come about? Large meadows and forests in many regions of modern-day Switzerland have been managed collectively by local populations for over 500 years. In mountain regions in particular, these corporations and communities still manage common agricultural areas, known as Allmenden (in German), according to clear rules and sustainable principles. Farmers did exactly this for centuries in the ... Full story here Are you the author?

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SWI swissinfo.ch – the international service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). Since 1999, swissinfo.ch has fulfilled the federal government’s mandate to distribute information about Switzerland internationally, supplementing the online offerings of the radio and television stations of the SBC. Today, the international service is directed above all at an international audience interested in Switzerland, as well as at Swiss citizens living abroad.

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