Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
being equal, the greater the losses of the common pool then the greater
the size of the anticipated aggregate benei ts of institutional change
and the more likely new property rights will be sought and adopted.
Nationalization of environmental resources in many developing countries
seems to be inl uenced by this hypothesis as well as 'the tragedy of the
commons' metaphor. In this metaphor, resources managed under common
property rights and open accesses were frequently viewed as synonymous.
It was thought that a resource held under a CPR regime is inherently inef-
i cient since individuals do not get proper incentives to act in a socially ei -
cient way. As a consequence scholars have long questioned the incentive
for ei cient use of CPRs under common property regimes (Gordon, 1954;
Scott, 1955; Hardin, 1968) and solutions have been proposed, such as state
control and management (Hardin, 1968) or privatization of the commons
(Demsetz, 1964). In explaining the tragedy of the commons, the economic
theory focuses less upon the weakness of the individuals and more upon
the imperfections in the social systems to which they respond. In fact,
economists are less convinced of the importance of human failing in deter-
mining social outcomes, simply because economists have believed in a
special form of social synergism since the time of Adam Smith. However,
more careful analysis of the foundation of common property regimes in
developing countries has shown that local institutional arrangements,
including customs and social conventions designed to induce cooperative
solutions, can overcome the collective action problems and help achieve
ei ciency in the use of such resources (Gibbs and Bromley, 1989; Ostrom,
1990). In the following section, I present a critical analysis of the common
property and open access resource systems and explain how common
property institutions were misunderstood.
Property regimes: open access versus common property
The terms 'open access resource' and 'common property resource' are
often confused and sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably. While the
i rst term refers to resources over which no dei ned property rights exist,
the second specii es the resources managed under community ownership.
Hardin (1968) saw over-exploitation as an inevitable outcome of the use
of common resources, even when the individuals sharing the benei ts of
such resources act in an economically rational way. Hardin was neither
alone nor novel in making the argument about open access resources.
An article on the open access problem can be traced back to the early
twentieth century. A little-known article by Jens Warming written in 1911
(cited in Stevenson, 1991) is perhaps the earliest more or less accurate
description of the open access problem. Two modern resource economists,
Gordon (1954) and Scott (1955) provided the general conventional theory
