Common Property Theory Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Common property theory addresses the use and abuse of resources often held in common, such as pastures, forests, fisheries, groundwater, and even the global atmosphere. Common property theory has evolved from a concern with the Tragedy of the Commons, through a series of detailed studies documenting successful traditional systems for managing common property resources, and into a sophisticated body of theory addressing the conditions under which people are able to forge sets of rules and practices that coordinate the use and conservation of common resources.

According to the Tragedy of the Commons approach, a resource owned in common will almost certainly be abused. In a common property pasture, for example, individuals gain all the benefit from putting more sheep on the pasture; all the milk, meat, and wool belongs to the individual. However, each sheep added to the pasture subtracts from the total grass available. These actions of individual shepherds would inevitably lead to overstocking and grass depletion.

Tragedy of the Commons

The concept of “free-riding” is central to the Tragedy of the Commons formulation. “Free-riders” are resource users who shirk the work and responsibilities of contributing to resource management. For example, free-riders can eschew such work of investing in an irrigation system, but still enjoy the benefits of water delivery. When a person cannot be excluded from benefits that others provide, there is little motivation to contribute to joint efforts. If everybody decides to free-ride, however, there are no benefits from sound resource management. The free-riding problem makes voluntary contributions to a public good (such as common property maintenance) illogical; solutions require outside coercion. According to this early formulation of common property theory, only privatization or state control could resolve this dilemma. Either the resource must be allocated to individual owners who will suffer their own consequences if they overstock, or else the state must impose rules to restrain the effects of individual rationality.

One way to summarize the Tragedy of the Commons view is the adage that “everybody’s property is nobody’s property.” For many, this formulation remains the Commons problem, in spite of a great deal of work documenting successful common property management regimes. Such ideas continue to have great cultural resonance in Western thinking. On the one hand, private property evokes the “invisible hand” of the market that guides individually selfish actions toward the greatest social good. On the other, lack of private property leads to brutish chaos and disorder.

Current common property theorists identify several conceptual errors in the Tragedy of the Commons formulation. Common property is not everybody’s property. Instead, common property is one of several different ways to organize ownership of common pool resources a class of resources for which it is difficult to exclude people and for which use involves the ability of subtraction. A fishery is a clear example of a common pool resource; it is difficult to keep fishers out, and when a fisher makes a catch, it is no longer available for other fishers.

There are four basic property regimes for such resources. Under open access, there is no exclusion and no rules governing individual use. Under private property, the resource is parceled out to individuals. Under state property, the state retains ownership and regulates the resources. Under communal property, which is often referred to as “common property,” an identifiable community of resource users is able to exclude other users and subject the resource to customs and rules. It is a misunderstanding to conflate “the commons” or “common property” with open access. Tragedy of the Commons only portrays a very small subset of common pool resource owner-ship arrangements.

Common Property in the Past

Over the years, the Tragedy of the Commons perspective has spawned a heated counter-response, especially from anthropologists, geographers, and other researchers familiar with the numerous small-scale, often non-Western societies that have successfully developed social practices to manage common pool resources. Ethnographies provide details on the diverse societies in the past and present that have independently come up with communal arrangements to manage common-pool resources. Many of these communal property systems have persisted for long periods, because they build on knowledge of the resource and cultural norms that have evolved and been tested over time. From medieval common grazing lands to wild beaver populations in subarctic Canada, different societies have frequently been able to work out rules for the orderly use of common pool resources of interest to them.

The rules for orderly use in different societies are often stunningly complex and intricately embedded in cultural systems. Researchers note, for example, that rural tenure systems in developing countries are typically quite different from the notion of exclusive private property in land, which has evolved over several centuries in the West. In contemporary rural societies, for example, there may be coincident rights to fruits from a tree, the firewood it produces, and the land it grows on. Rights holders are similarly complex. They include villages, kinship groups, households, men, women, government-sanctioned cooperatives, and national forest departments. Taboos, religion, and local views of morality often underline tenure systems. Local structures of authority-such as chiefs, temples, and village councils-play important roles in maintaining these rights and arbitrating disputes. A moral economy is often involved in maintaining these common systems.

Unfortunately, these complex resource-management systems are often susceptible to breaking down following clumsy interventions from the state, commercialization, land degradation, population pressures, encroachment, and the expropriation of common resources by outsiders or a few members of the community. In forests, for example, an anticommons attitude often resulted in nationalization or privatization via concessions. These policies sweep away established local systems of resource control, converting communal management regimes into open-access situations where the state has nominal authority, but no real power. The “real tragedy of the commons,” according to some common property theorists, is the destruction of common pool resource management systems and subsequent environmental degradation following the intrusion of modernizing states and modern economic relationships.

Currently, debates about common property go beyond the Tragedy appraoches. Analysts now develop theories of common pool resource management that attempt to explain whether, and under what circumstances, common pool resource users can individually organize and achieve sound management of their fishery, forest, global atmosphere, or other common pool resource.

One group of common property theorists does not challenge the basic notion of a dilemma between individual and collective rationality; rather, it identifies the difference between open access and a common property regime, where internally-enforced rules, or social institutions, harness individual rationality to the collective good.

This school argues that free-riding is not always the dominant rational strategy. With adequate institutions, understood as rules that coordinate social relationships, cooperation becomes a rational strategy. For contemporary commons researchers, the question is under what circumstances are communal management arrangements appropriate, and can the state, the market and civil organizations together promote efficient, fair, and conservative use of common pool resource management?

Institutional Choice is one of the most influential and theoretically powerful attempts to address this question. The approach holds that people have the ability to craft the institutions (understood mainly as rules) that govern their use of a resource held in common. Institutional Choice addresses two basic issues. The search for design principles identifies and catalogues the features and rules shared by successful commons management systems. Institutional Choice also assesses the conditions under which groups of people are likely to develop successful common pool management systems. Institutional Choice rests on a notion of rational individuals making cost–benefit analyses of whether or not to invest in processes of institutional change.

Seven Key Design Principles

Through fieldwork and a careful comparison of a large number of case studies of different types of long-enduring communal management regimes, common property theorists have identified about seven key design principles.

First, successful common pool management systems have clearly defined boundaries of the resource and its users. Second, there is a proportional equivalence between benefits and costs, such that rights of usage are balanced with obligations to invest labor, materials, and/or money into the management system.

Third, there are collective-choice arrangements, in which most resource users are included in the group and able to modify the rules. Fourth, there are monitors, sometimes the resource users themselves, who actively audit both physical conditions and user behavior, and who are at least partially accountable to the users.

Fifth, there are enforcement mechanisms with graduated sanctions. Violators of resource use rules are punished in accord with the seriousness and context of the offense. Sixth, conflict-resolution mechanisms are available so resource users and their officials can resolve conflicts amongst themselves. Seventh, the state grants resource users some minimal recognition of rights to organize. The state does not challenge locally devised institutions, and it recognizes users’ long-term tenure rights to the resource. For resources that are part of larger systems-such as mountain pastures and large-scale irrigation systems-commons management systems are often “nested enterprises” with resource use, monitoring, enforcement, and conflict resolution organized in multiple layers of “nested organizations.

The Institutional Choice approach to common property theory also assesses the conditions under which groups of people are likely to develop successful, common-pool management regimes. According to this approach, rational actors choose to invest in rule changes based on an analysis of benefits and costs. A framework for analyzing institutional change summarizes these variables in a number of factors favoring collective action. First, users of a commonly held resource agree that lack of change will harm them; they know they have a resource-use problem. Second, the resource users care about the continuation of benefits from the common property resource. Third, they face relatively low information, transformation, and enforcement costs. Fourth, they share norms of reciprocity and trust. This includes a capacity to communicate and make binding agreements, the ability to arrange for monitoring and enforcement provisions, shared norms of guilt, concepts of self-worth, social censure, and patterns of reciprocity. Fifth, the group of resource users is well-defined.

Other things being equal, it may be more difficult to organize with a large, dispersed, and ethnically heterogeneous group than with a smaller, ethnically homogenous group living in a single settlement. While heterogeneity was originally viewed to inhibit collective organization, subsequent refinements to theory recognized that internal difference might foster cooperation via trade benefits. Other analysts stressed the importance of communication, preferably face-to-face, as a catalyst for collective decisions on rules of common-pool resource management.

Critics of Institutional Choice

Several criticisms of Institutional Choice have arisen. Because Institutional Choice emphasizes the role of local communities in resource management, and often obscures the role of states, influential market structures, and other powerful actors operating at multiple scales, some point out that common property management regimes evolve or erode amongst resource-use influences and power relations embedded in local, regional, national, and international scales. For some common property theorists, these are much more important than the local-scale situational factors fostering collective action or the types of rules associated with successful commons management. Common property theorists call for increased attention to the relationship between common property management regimes and outside structures, such as market structure, the multiple implications of commodification, state programs, and even international trade agreements and regulations.

A cultural critique rejects the idea that rational choice can successfully explain the commons. For these common property theorists, institutions of common pool resource management, the community, the individual person, and culture are all interpenetrated items composing a realm of meaning and identity. Commons users are not only embedded in specific historical sets of political and economic structures, but also in cultural systems of meanings, symbols, and values. For this approach, the commons is culture, so rational choice only makes sense within a specific cultural context, and is often constrained by deeply rooted moral economies.

Common property theory is also challenged by the global scale of common pool resource management issues. Questions remain, for example, about the extent to which the design principles and situational variables central to common pool management regimes at the local scale will transfer to the realm of international cooperation and other largescale, common pool resources.

Finally, common property theorists also struggle to factor in the inherent uncertainty and instability of environmental systems. It is difficult to separate environmental flux from the role of social institutions and human activities when analyzing common pool resource management successes and failures.

Despite these continuing disagreements and uncertainties, common property theorists agree that common pool resources are not always destined for a tragedy of over exploitation. They agree that the commons can be successfully managed by a wide variety of ownership arrangements.

Bibliography:

David Feeny, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie McCay, and James Acheson, “The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-Two Years Later,” Human Ecology (v.18, 1990);
National Research Council, The Drama of the Commons, Ostrom, T. Dietz, N. Dolsak, P. Stern, S. Stonich, and E. Weber, eds., Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change (National Academy Press, 2002);
Ostrom, Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).