Designing New Common Property Regimes for New Landscape Futures

Abstract

"It is conventional to think of common property regimes that are devised by communities who use certain natural resources in common as very traditional social institutions dependent on considerable face-to-fact contact for enforcement, and therefore as unlikely to work in industrialized or commercialized settings. However, I would like us to examine common property regimes as complex systems of reorganizing the strands in the classic bundle of property rights, and to consider the possibility that this re-allocation of strands — reallocation of particular rights, of streams of benefits, of responsibilities for oversight — is exactly what we are finding we must do wherever we face environmental externalities. It does not matter whether the environmental externalities occur in hunter-gatherer societies or in self-contained agricultural settlements or in dense industrial urban settings. In comparing some of the traditional long-lasting and successful common property regimes to new attempts at environmental regulation, we may be able to identify crucial weaknesses or imagine new remedies in our contemporary efforts."