The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies

Abstract

"The term 'common property' has been largely misunderstood and falsely interpreted for the past two-three decades. Common property regimes are not the free-for-all that they have been described to be, but are structured ownership arrangements within which management rules are developed, group size is known and enforced, incentives exist for co-owners to follow the accepted institutional arrangements, and sanctions work to insure compliance.

"Resource degradation in the developing countries, while incorrectly attributed to 'common property systems' intrinsically, actually originates in the dissolution of local-level institutional arrangements whose very purpose was to give rise to resource use patterns that were sustainable. Natural resource deterioration is also occurring widely outside the boundaries of common property systems, under private property and state property regimes.

"When local-level institutional arrangements were undermined or destroyed, the erstwhile common property regimes gradually converted into open access in which the rule of capture drove each to get as much as possible before others did. While this has been referred to as the 'tragedy of the commons' it is, in reality, the 'tragedy of open access.' The dissolution of traditional local institutional arrangements has not been followed by the establishment of more effective institutions, and national governments in most developing countries have not adequately substituted for these former resource management regimes."