Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Third, resource users may use inei cient methods to harvest a resource
as in the case of unregulated common property resources. Competing
resource users over-use capital-intensive harvesting methods in their
attempts to out-harvest each other. In general, they do not consider the
negative impact of their activity on the welfare of another. Fourth, resource
users under open access regimes are not likely to invest in resource con-
servation, even if they know that investment improves the productivity of
the commons. No one has any incentive to invest unless there is an assur-
ance that other users will also invest in order to enhance the productivity
of the commons. This situation is similar to under-investment in public
goods such as clean air. Open access resource users invest in replenishing
the forest only until the marginal costs equal a fraction of the marginal
benei t. This under-investment results from a divergence between those
who invest in the improvements and those who reap the benei ts. The
divergence results from a mismatch of the scale of some investments and
the amount of potential individual benei t, and from a lack of incentive to
invest in the resource for future benei ts because of a competitive rush for
the resource exploitation in the present (Stevenson, 1991).
People who may have strong incentives to invest in protecting trees for
fodder or timber will have much less incentive to do so for public goods
like clean air and soil conservation because they fear others will 'free-ride'
on their ef orts or because they can free-ride themselves. Those who do
not invest because they see little direct benei t are still able to gain from
the investments by others (Varughese, 1999). This inei ciently low invest-
ment by resource users imposes a welfare loss on the group of community
members. Finally, users of CPRs in open access regimes under-invest in
information about the resource since they have no incentive to acquire
knowledge about planting methods, growth rates, or optimal cutting
techniques and so on. A person who has perfect information about a
CPR under an open access regime would not change his or her behaviour
regarding the resource use, because other users would capture most of the
benei ts of any potential change. Thus, no one has any incentive to gather
the information necessary to increase the productivity of commons held
under open access regimes (Wallace, 1981), which seriously threaten the
long-term sustainability of natural resources.
Common property
Common property refers to resources for which there are communal
arrangements for the exclusion of non-owners and allocation among co-
owners. Common property exists when a dei ned group of resource users
holds property rights to natural resources and there is a restriction on the
number of people who can reap a benei t from the commons. As I noted
