Common Property Theory

Common property theory (CPT) refers to a body of cross-disciplinary literature that deals with the historical and contemporary institutional governance and management of valued resources ranging from fisheries and forests to atmospheric sinks, oceans, and genetic materials. CPT was originally developed to understand the problems of managing what are termed common-pool resources. Common-pool resources are valued resources that all can use (principle of the difficulty of exclusion of users) and for which one person's use reduces what is available to others (principle of subtractability or rivalry), thus running the risk of overuse and degradation.

Interest and debate on the special characteristics of common-pool resources and the problems of their management are found throughout history. However, such resources have taken on contemporary significance as a result of the growth of capitalism and its [Page 64]valorization of the idea of private property ownership as the most efficient means to regulate the use of natural and human resources. During the 1950s and 1960s, disciplines as diverse as resource economics, biology, and sociology tended to view so-called communal forms of property ownership as premodern, to be swept away by market or state regulation of extraction, production, and exchange.

Seminal articles by H. S. Gordon on fisheries management and by Garrett Hardin on the tragedy of the commons led to vigorous academic and policy debate over their claims that uncontrolled access to a valued resource resulted in its destruction and that some form of private or state property system would be necessary to ensure proper management of common-pool resources. Underlying their approach was the asocial assumption that humans were motivated solely by self-interest, that they took a largely material and instrumental view of nature, that they could not be expected to act collectively, and that therefore, common property regimes were a hindrance to capitalist (and socialist) forms of progress and should be replaced by private or state control.

Gordon and Hardin's modeling played an important heuristic role in generating considerable economic, biological, and anthropological theoretical and empirical research on the historical and contemporary management of a range of resources, particularly common-pool resources such as fisheries, forests, wetlands, and pastures. Gordon and Hardin were criticized for confusing open access regimes (res nullius) with common property regimes (res communes) and for failing to consider that controlled community access to common-pool resources could be beneficial for both resource conservation and resources users alike. Critics, drawing on game theory and case studies of resource-based communities around the world, emphasized the cooperative possibilities of human action over atomistic models of human behavior. They argued that under the right social, political, and economic conditions, people were capable of engaging in collective action to achieve increased productivity, greater social equity among resources users, and enhanced environmental and social sustainability.