Common Property Arrangements for the Contemporary World

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Date

1998

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Abstract

"From the last several centuries of evolution in property arrangements in many societies, it would be easy, though almost certainly incorrect, to conclude that individual private property is always a more efficient form of property rights than common or shared property. We know that commons have been enclosed and parcelled all over the world to increase investment in them and to increase production that can be extracted from them, often with great success. But we also know that even though this change seems to have improved both protection and production on many resources, it has not worked on others. In many environmentally stressed resource systems around the world, we now witness a battle over further transformations of property rights, between those who would legitimize and legalize common property arrangements and those who advocate continued enclosure and parcelling. It is clear that some people want to apply 'privatization' (or really 'individualization.' since it may be appropriate to see common property as shared private property and thus as 'privatized' already) as a universal treatment for environmental distress, while others see circumstances in which common property will serve the cause of environmental protection and environmentally sustainable production better. This paper attempts to sort out systematically the conditions - when and where - common property arrangements may actually be more efficient than individually parcelled ownership. It relies on both deductive argument from theories of property rights and inductive generalizations based on the historical record of human experience with common property arrangements. It concludes that common property arrangements can be regarded as a package of Coaseian bargains with an efficiency advantage in internalizing externalities that arise among parcels within a large resource system, in ecological settings where these externalities are inevitable, and in providing both incentives and mechanisms to cap aggregate use of a resource system that is being used very close to the limit of sustainability."

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property rights, common pool resources, externalities, co-management

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