SIO 295 Common property resources

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SIO 295Common property resources
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Readings

• E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge
  University Press, 1990)
• E. Ostrom, Reformulating the commons, in
  Protecting the Commons, ed. J. Burger et al.
  (Island Press, 2001)
• J.M. Baland J.P. Platteau, Halting Degradation
  of Natural Resources (Clarendon Press, 1996)
• J.M. Baland and J.P. Platteau, Economics of
  common property management regimes, in Handbook
  of Environmental Economics, Vol. 1, ed. K.G.
  Mäler and J.R. Vincent (North-Holland, 2003)

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Collective action

• Fishers have an incentive to craft an agreement
  with the following key features
• All fishers agree to limit their effort so that
  the collective effort does not exceed EMEY
• The fishers agree to hire someone to ensure that
  no one cheats
• All fishers receive a share of the rent that
  remains after paying costs of policing
• Why doesnt this self-organization happen?

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CPRs

• Actually, it does happen many examples of common
  property resources (CPRs) in developing
  countries, and not just for fisheries
• Long studied by anthropologists, largely ignored
  by economists until 1990s
• Tragedy of the Commons model predicts rent
  dissipation in part because it didnt allow
  cooperation or repeated interaction among fishers
• Prisoners dilemma

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Example of fishery CPR beach seining in s. Sri
Lanka

• Rules
• Village fishing collective controls stretch of
  beach
• Villagers are allowed to fish only if own a share
  of a net (transferred only through inheritance)
• Nets require 8 fishermen to operate and are owned
  jointly
• Ownership carries obligation to work when
  required
• Each owner/operator receives 1/8th share of catch
• Rotation system provides equal access to
  different zones of beach

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Literature on CPRs, per BP

• A striking feature of most of these studies lies
  in the fact that their authors are generally
  convinced that, given the glaring failure of
  state ownership experiences in developing
  countries, collective, community-based regulation
  holds out the best prospects for efficient
  management of village-level natural resources.
• Yet, since they recognize at the same time that
  the balance sheet of actual experiences of common
  property management is mixed, the central aim of
  their inquiries is typically to understand the
  reasons that can account for these varying levels
  of performance .

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• CPRs dont always evolve
• Attributes of users (appropriators)
• Attributes of the resource
• CPRs dont always endure
• Example Meg McKeans analysis of common lands in
  Japan (see Ostrom, Governing the Commons)
• 12 million ha of forests and uncultivated
  mountain meadows during 17th-19th centuries
• 3 million ha today
• CPRs are not altruistic utopias
• Rather, like hard-nosed condominium associations

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Conditions under which CPRsare likely to evolve

• Attributes of the resource
• Spatial extent sufficiently small that users can
  develop accurate knowledge of characteristics
• Indicators information on condition is regularly
  available and not too costly
• Predictability flow of goods is relatively
  predictable
• Feasible improvement not too underutilized or
  too overutilized

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• Attributes of the users
• Salience significantly dependent on resource
• Low discount rate value future benefits at
  non-negligible level
• Common understanding of resource attributes
• Autonomy user group can set access and
  harvesting rules without being countermanded by
  external authority
• Prior organizational experience and local
  leadership have participated in other local
  associations or learned how other groups have
  organized
• Trust and reciprocity expect promises will be
  kept

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Attributes of long-enduring CPRS

• Minimal recognition of rights to organize
• Ownership of the uncultivated lands near a
  village devolved from the imperial court to the
  villages through several intermediate stages
  involving land stewards and locally based
  warriors.
• Counter-example Nepal (Michael Wallace,
  Managing resources that are common property,
  JPAM, 1983)Until 1957, when the forests were
  nationalized, villagers controlled the use of the
  forests in their localities. villagers reacted
  negatively to nationalization, believing that
  their traditional rights of access and use had
  been curtailed. As a result, local
  responsibility for forest protection disappeared.
  Whereas previously there had been communal
  responsibility for managing the forest, after
  nationalization no one took responsibility for
  managing this resource.

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• Clearly defined boundaries
• Resource National cadastral surveys were
  conducted late in the 16th century at a time of
  land reform . As villages asserted their own
  rights to these lands, they shared a clear image
  of which lands were private and which were held
  in common.
• Users Each village contained a carefully
  recorded, defined number of households. Rights
  were variously based on cultivation rights in
  land, taxpaying obligations, or ownership rights
  in land. In some villages, almost all households
  had rights to the use of the commons. In
  others, such rights were more narrowly held.

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• Congruence
• Appropriation rules and resource conditions A
  village headman usually was responsible for
  determining the date when the harvesting of a
  given product could begin. For abundant plants,
  the date would be selected simply to ensure that
  plants had matured and had propagated themselves.
  No limit was placed on the amount to be
  gathered. For scarce products, various
  harvesting rules were used.
• Distribution of benefits of appropriation and
  costs of rules There were written rules about
  the obligation of each household to contribute a
  share to the collective work to maintain the
  commons. Accounts were kept about who
  contributed what to make sure that no household
  evaded its responsibilities unnoticed.

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• Collective-choice arrangements
• Individuals affected by rules can participate in
  modifying them Each village was governed by
  an assembly, usually composed of the heads of all
  the households that had been assigned
  decision-making authority in the village.
  village assemblies created detailed authority
  rules specifying in various ways how much of each
  valued product a household could harvest from the
  commons and under what conditions.

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• Monitoring
• Given that the mountain usually was closed,
  except for specific periods, anyone caught in the
  community-owned territories at other times
  obviously was not following the rules. Most of
  the villages hired detectives who daily
  patrolled the commons on horseback in groups of
  two looking for unauthorized users.

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• Graduated sanctions
• An occasional infraction would be handled by the
  detective in a quiet and simple manner. It was
  considered perfectly appropriate for the
  detective to demand cash and saké from violators
  .
• The most serious sanctions that could be and
  occasionally were imposed involved complete
  ostracism or ultimately banishment from the
  village.

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• Conflict-resolution mechanisms
• Genuine disagreement about management decisions
  of village headman could occur
• Mechanisms can exist within village or by appeal
  to external authority

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Rousseaus noble savages?

• BP The anthropological literature provides us
  with interesting examples of hunting and fishing
  societies where the agents of ecological
  destruction have a poor understanding of their
  role in this process.

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• Ponams (PNG) opposed a government plan aimed at
  the conservation of fish and other marine
  resources because they refused to ascribe
  declining fish catches to a decrease in fish
  population (Carrier 1987)

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• Cree (James Bay) acc. Berkes (1987), Cree
  practices violate nearly every conservation-orient
  ed, indirect-effort control measure in the
  repertory of contemporary scientific fisheries
  management. hunters are passive. Any
  management system claiming to maximize
  productivity by manipulating the animals is
  considered arrogant.

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• Senegal They do not seriously consider the
  possibility of their being partly responsible for
  overfishing therefore, the idea that they could
  combat environmental degradation by restricting
  their own fishing effort seems alien to most of
  them. The tendency to blame the other for
  stock depletion is typical of almost all
  artisanal fishing communities . (Gaspart and
  Platteau 2001)