Browsing by Author "Berry, Albert"

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Community Management: An Optimal Resource Regime for Forests in Developing Economies?
(1998) Kant, Sashi; Berry, Albert; Nautiyal, J. C.
"An important strand of thinking about efficient use of natural resources is the economic theory of commons. A conventional view is that common property rights are inconsistent with efficient utilization of natural resources in the absence of some form of government intervention, and that given the impediments to effective intervention private property rights are a better bet. Rose (1994) challenges the validity of this proposition for some types of property, and concludes that communal management may be socially wealth-enhancing for properties with certain of the characteristics of public goods, such as roads and waterways. Also calling the conventional theory into question is a rich and growing body of empirical evidence from around the world which points to the successful management of a wide variety of natural resources as common/communal property. Some authors have used game-theoretic frameworks to explain the observed frequency of collective action in natural resource management. While such game-theoretic models, together with the empirical literature, offer important insights into the sustainability of common property regimes, a solid theory of the optimal institutional bases for resource management is necessary both for a fully satisfactory understanding of such regimes and as a basis for policy prescriptions. In this paper, we attempt a more formal theory of optimal resource regimes in which institutional factors are taken account of explicitly."
Path Dependence, Multiple Equilibria, and Adaptive Efficiency in Forest Regimes in India
(1999) Kant, Sashi; Berry, Albert
"The evolution of forest regimes in India has almost completed a full cycle from the community regime in the pre-British period through state regimes during the British colonial period and the first post-independence phase and finally back to community based regimes in the 1990s. During the British period that evolution may be characterized as discontinuous, in the standard (temporal) sense, but path-dependent in a geographical sense. Change resulted from the imposition of a new organizational structure with enough energy to dismantle the existing structure; its geographical path-dependency reflected the inertia of the British organizational structure developed in other countries. Regimes changes in the post-British period have been path-dependent (in the temporal sense) due to self-reinforcing mechanisms,among which organizational inertia has been the dominant one. fa the post 1987 phase,external factors(outside the government and the forest department), such as non-governmental organizations and peoples initiatives at the local level have moved the process closer to one of adaptive efficiency. However, multiple forest regimes have been present at all times. An argument is made for development of a theory of evolution of resource regimes that incorporates interactions between formal institutions and the informal institutions of user groups of the state's forestry administration."