Common Property Resource Management

Common property resource management regimes are defined as a set of institutional arrangements that regulate the use of common pool resources (CPRs, also called the commons). The institutional arrangement or property rights governing CPRs could be no property (open access), private property, government property, and common or communal property. Owing to the historical development in the field of knowledge on the commons, there is much confusion between the nature or characteristics of a CPR and the management mechanisms forged to address the problems of the commons. CPRs are those natural and human-constructed resources where it is difficult to exclude potential users and the benefits derived from the resource are subtractable. These are called the principles of difficulty of exclusion and subtractability. Examples of CPRs are irrigation systems, groundwater basins, fishing grounds, pastures, forests, the atmosphere, wildlife, biodiversity, digital commons, and so on. The problem of subtractability makes CPRs particularly vulnerable to congestion, overuse, and degradation, while the difficulty of exclusion creates a “free rider” [Page 529]problem (where some users consume more than their fair share of a resource), which in turn threatens the long-term sustainable use of the resources.

In his hugely influential, but now controversial, 1968 thesis of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin argued that because of the unique characteristic of the commons, the users of the commons were trapped in a behavioral situation that ultimately led to the destruction of the very resources they depended on. To avoid the tragedy from playing out, Hardin suggested that the commons should be either privatized or managed by the government in which right to entry and use could be controlled. Hardin's thesis proved to be one of the most influential works in the environmental field and has had a huge sway over policy making in the field of natural resources management. However, later scholars such as Elinor Ostrom (among others) found that Hardin's simple policy prescription that the tragedy of the commons could only be avoided by privatizing the resource or putting it under government control was erroneous. This was because it disregarded a range of cases where CPRs were governed effectively under common or communal property regimes and where the predicted tragedy did not occur. The large consensus that emerged over the past two decades is that the tragedy of the commons that Hardin referred to was indeed the tragedy of open access (res nullius, or no property) and not that of common property (res communes). The confusion, it became apparent, was that CPRs could either remain ungoverned under an open-access regime—this is what Hardin referred to as “Tragedy of the Commons,” or be managed as private property, government property, or common property and that the absence of a property regime was often confused with a common property regime.