The Role of the State in Managing Common Pool Resources: The Search for Solutions to Manage Non-Timber Forest Products in British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

"Institutional and property rights literature on common pool resources (CPRs) describes various conditions under which successful property regimes may evolve. But what happens when this natural evolution does not occur, property regimes dissolve, or competing and detrimental uses have well defined rights that take precedence? The backdrop for this presentation is British Columbia, Canada, where the commercial harvest of non-timber forest products occurs at potentially destructive rates on de facto open access or under-managed public land, amidst a well defined timber tenure system. Appropriators are disorganized and the provincial government struggles to understand if a problem exists, and to identify appropriate policy responses. The research upon which this paper is based seeks to understand why a state should intervene in a CPR market, when a state should intervene, and how a state may intervene and begin to structure the way in which it approaches the management problem? Thus, what is the state's role in managing CPRs? The paper develops an intervention model to assess CPRs under stress and to determine whether or not some form of intervention is necessary. By identifying sources of institutional failure and contextual factors that contribute to the level of potential degradation the model provides a basis to begin to approach the management of a CPR through facilitative, coordinating, or prescriptive approaches. This approach does not start with a particular management paradigm; rather it starts with the CPR social-ecological system and builds the management regime up from the level of the resource and user-community. The commercial harvest of salal in British Columbia is used as a test case. The model indicates commercial salal is at risk and government intervention is warranted."