Kitamura, Kenji., and Roger A Clapp. 2004. "Grassroots Nature Reserves and Common Property Protected Areas." Presented at "The Commons in an Age of Global Transition: Challenges, Risks and Opportunities," the Tenth Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Oaxaca, Mexico, August 9-13.

Abstract

From pages 2-3:
"This paper argues that common property regimes can also regulate resource use by a wide variety of stakeholders in order to conserve the many non-consumptive values of nature, as do protected areas. This gap in the literature appears to exist because conservation usually implies non- use, while common property theory is usually concerned with the consumptive use of common-pool resources where 'exclusion from the resource is costly and one person's use subtracts from what is available to others' (Dietz et al. 2002: 18). Furthermore, protected areas are often regarded as a kind of institution entirely separate from common property regimes. Indeed, some advocates of local control have seen protected areas as examples of a new enclosure movement (Escobar 1995; Katz 3 1998), responsible for undermining otherwise effective systems of customary or indigenous resource governance (Peluso 1992; Neumann 1998). We share the concern for sustaining livelihoods based on local resource use and governance that motivates many of these researchers, but argue that common property theory can also be applied to resources which are not subtractable: many of the concepts, including institutions for collective decision-making, can sustain broader environmental values by facilitating non-consumptive resource use (Freese 1998). This paper will explore the potential synergies between common property theory and conservation strategy in the establishment and management of protected areas."