Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 5.2
Role of social capital and state capability in selecting
appropriate institutions for commons management
State
Capability
Social Capital
Low
High
Low
(Hybrid: private sector
management under contract or
regulation)
Community- based management
High
Public sector management
Hybrid: co-management
involving government agencies
and local communities
Source:
Birner and Wittmer (2000).
capital (state assistance in maintaining this governance structure) and
state capability (transparency may help to reduce corruption in the public
sector) (Birner and Wittmer, 2000). Birner and Wittmer (2000) summarize
the attributes of the most important governance structures for common
property resource management in Table 5.3.
Because transaction costs are a function of the chosen governance struc-
ture and physical characteristics of the resource, ex ante evaluation of pos-
sible resource regime and associated transaction costs is thus an apparent
challenge. Since measuring transaction costs is itself a very dii cult task,
estimating the expected gain from selecting a particular governance struc-
ture is also troublesome. Vätn (2001, p. 671) points out, 'when setting up a
regime one must also evaluate or make qualii ed guesses about the future
development of external costs, for example, costs due to technological
change, new products, etc, implying changes in matter cycles and habitat
interactions'. Theoretical insights presented in this section help to evaluate
and design appropriate forms of governance structure for natural resource
management in these circumstances.
Empirical studies
Having described transaction cost theory and the criteria in selecting
appropriate governance structures I now provide a brief overview of
empirical attempts that try to measure the transaction costs of collec-
tive action. The concern in this section is with three types of transaction
costs: (1) information costs, (2) bargaining costs and (3) enforcement
costs, as described in the previous section. Very few empirical studies
have attempted to measure the transaction costs of community-based
resource management. Davies and Richards (1999) extensively reviewed
the literature on economic analysis of participatory forest management to
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