Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
property regime, the user may have a secure expectation of getting certain
amounts of product from the commons, but not particular physical units.
The joint, non-exclusive entitlement condition means that participants in
common property arrangements have simultaneous, ex ante claims on any
particular unit of the resource and it can be argued that an essential step
in the use of common property resources (except the resources that have a
pure public good characteristic) is that they be 'reduced' to sole ownership
by capture (Stevenson, 1991). As indicated earlier, point i ve also provides
some basis to distinguish between common property and public goods.
First, some common property resources like national parks, reserves and
so on have public good characteristics that do not exhibit rivalry at low or
moderate levels of use. Reducing the resource to sole ownership through
capture does not apply in the way that it does to resources that exhibit
rivalry in extraction. Second, these resources exhibit joint, non-exclusive
entitlement, because all participants who use the resource have an ex
ante claim to benei ts from the resource. For these reasons, reduction to
sole ownership through capture is not a necessary condition for common
property, but joint, non-exclusive entitlement is (Stevenson, 1991).
Point six indicates that, though multiple users compete for the resource
appropriation and exploitation in common property, they undertake
mutual capital investments in resource conservation. To better understand
this idea, reconsider the problem of common goods. As in an open access
condition, extraction by one user of the resource in a common property
regime may generate negative externalities for other users. However, the
dif erence lies in the extent to which externalities are generated. Point
seven recognizes that the resource users and resource owners do not
always coincide in a common property regime. Common property rights
holders may rent their resource use rights to the actual users subject to
the condition that the rights holders are a group of people who fuli l the
institutional criteria of common property regimes (Stevenson, 1991).
This is not meant to preclude the situation in which a government entity
coordinates or imposes rules regarding resource extraction on users and
rights holders. A common property resource, therefore, is a resource held
by an identii able community of interdependent users in which these users
exclude outsiders while regulating use by members of the local community
(Feeny et al., 1998).
Transaction costs and natural resource management
Insights from the economics literature
Transaction costs have been a subject of discussion in the literature
on externalities over the past few decades. In his seminal article 'The
