Common Pool Resources

This article presents a bibliographic review of the main trends of thought that have proposed models for the management of common-pool resources – CPR. It describes three generations of researchers; first, the conservative ideas of Garret Hardin, Mancur Olson and Albert W. Tucker, referring to the application of state regulation and privatization of property rights as the only solutions for the management of common pool resources; second, the liberal proposal of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, which call for the strengthening of local capacities and self-management, to reach successful models of common pool resources use; and finally, as a research agenda of third generation, the article presents the questioning of Eduardo Araral to the generalization of the policy prescriptions proposed by both currents. The usefulness of these theoretical approaches is visible for regions like the Colombian Amazon, where collective (public and private) property rights prevail, and there is a current debate about the way as common pool resources should be administrated to guarantee the welfare of present and future generations. The analysis of these theoretical approaches is important, because it allows to improve the understanding of the dilemmas faced by local citizens and policy makers. In this sense, the comprehension of these approaches contributes to the regional debate about the models of natural resource management that should be adopted, in order to achieve their sustainable, efficient and equitable use.

Global overfishing indicates a need to define fisheries sustainability thresholds and identify social factors promoting successful management, but rates of fishing and factors mediating sustainability over long timescales are largely unknown. Here, we reconstruct fisheries yield for the entire period of human habitation (five to seven centuries) for two coral reef ecosystems with substantially different fisheries histories (Florida Keys and the Hawaiian Islands) and evaluate the management strategies associated with periods of sustainable fishing. This involved a mixed methods approach, in which we estimated yield by fishery sector (commercial, subsistence, recreational and aquaculture) and characterized management strategies associated with periods of sustained high yields. We found differences between the two locations, with Hawai‘i sustaining yields of more than 12 mt km−2 for four centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans. This period was characterized by adaptive management whose design and enforcement exhibited characteristics of common property resource governance systems, and which effectively protected reef habitat, vulnerable life-history stages for fish, and species with high susceptibilities to overfishing. Reefs in both Florida and Hawai‘i were exploited intensively after European contact, with sequential export-driven depletion evident in Florida over the past century. Today, both exhibit strikingly similar modern catch levels, with landings exceeding 10 mt km−2 and evidence of overfishing. Our results demonstrate that management strategies and social institutions that support strict enforcement by a local rule-making authority have had substantial impacts on fisheries yields in the past and suggest that long-term sustainability of fisheries is possible, although rare today.

Collective action for managing common pool resources is a vital element
with many appropriation and provision problems. Challenges of
ensuring collective action forces us to identify the determinants of
collective action. This study identifies what determines participation of
collective action for small scale irrigation farmers using canal irrigation
in Central Tigray. It also addresses determinants of intensity of collective
action participation given the farmers participate. The study uses
Multivariate probit regression to find the determinants of collective
action using a cross-sectional data from 240 observation. These
observation collected were from Dura, Laelay Logometi and Dibdebo
which are kebeles found in the Central Tigray Zone. This survey was
conducted in 2016 referring to 2007 E.C. The findings show that
determinants of collective action differ according to measurements of
collective action; but labour force in the household, income earned from
irrigation farming, membership in community organization, age of dam,
distance to all weather road and perception of rainfall adequacy affect
participation of an irrigation farmer in collective action positively.
Heckman sample selection was used to measure intensity of participation
in collective action resulting the different determinants to different
intensity measurements but age of dam affected intensity of participation
positively while size of irrigation dam had different sign with different
measurements of intensity. Hence policy makers should take into account
the determinants of collective action when designing irrigation projects.

This paper draws attention to the somewhat neglected domains of affects, emotions, and subjectivity in the study of the commons. The paper argues that a focus on affective and communicative relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans can enrich our understanding of the practices of commoning and the processes of becoming a commoner. Using the case of community forestry initiatives in Odisha, India, it illustrates how rural people become commoners through the embodied practices of caring for the forests as a shared common. The paper uses this empirical example and conceptual resources from affect theory and relational ontology to think about the commons as affective socio-nature entanglements and as a nurturing ground for subjectivity. It discusses the implications of attention on the commons and the practices of commoning for enabling the emergence of other-than-capitalist subjectivities.

"Poverty was at the heart of the tragedy of the commons discourse from the very beginning. The idea was that commoners would inevitably end up deprived due to their own resource overuse. As Hardin saw it, if the initial problem was freedom of the commons, then limiting that freedom would logically reduce poverty. In this article, we argue that alleviating poverty among resource users calls for a broader concept of freedom than Hardin’s – one that is more in line with that of Amartya Sen’s 'freedom as agency.' Based on case-studies of smallscale fisheries and poverty in Bangladesh and Tanzania, we claim that the root of the tragedy of the commons is the restriction of freedom rather than unlimited freedom and that it is arguable whether the people who have no other option than to continue fishing for their livelihood, even in over-exploited ecosystems, could be understood to be free."

The commons literature tends to treat community development as one of the independent variables that can explain variation in commons governance outcomes. The community development literature treats community development as its primary dependent variable, and studies how it can be achieved. We feel that the obvious complementarity between both traditions has up till now not been taken full advantage of. The purpose of this paper is to begin defining a common ground where both literatures can work together. We identify a big potential and an urgent need for complementary research on questions related with community development efforts that target collective action potential and self-governance capacity of commoners.

The theme ‘urban commons’ receives a lot of (scholarly) attention. A miscellany of approaches looks at urban commons, from an institutionalist approach of governing the commons, to a ‘third way’ - an ‘anti-capitalist’ view moving beyond state and market. Urban commons like public spaces differ from ‘traditional commons’; they are considered more of indirect value and generally less as common-pool resources (like forests, grazing areas). In the city, the commons is an inherently relational phenomenon, where (social) value is created through interaction. Public spaces as urban commons‚ in their free accessibility‚ bear the potential for practices of commoning founded in a community process. Urban commons have hardly (if at all) been related to the post-socialist Balkan city, though collective action and ownership was strongly proclaimed by these countries before the fall of Berlin Wall. Practices (experiences, social capital, governance)
of urban commons in post-socialist cities differ from those in Western cities, due to at least 3 reasons: i) after 1990/91 private sector led urban development has dominated; ii) government authorities and urban institutions are searching for new roles and responsibilities, resulting in ambiguous urban spaces exposed to neglect or commercialization; iii) communities have strong and negative memories of forced collective action. In this paper we review theory on [new] commons and give a contextualization of urban commons in post-socialist cities. Then, follow results of a study conducted in two Western Balkan capitals: Podgorica and Tirana. A number of public spaces typologies (squares / public spaces of different size and status) are analysed in both cities from the perspective of design principles of robust commons. The mixed methods used in the investigation and analysis deals with the common resource, the institutions and the community. The study concludes with suggestions for potential handling of the commons studied. The paper will reflect on the potential of the concept of urban commons for post-socialist cities.

Biological diversity is considered as a public good, non rival and not excludable. Nevertheless, there are environmental goods and services which can not be considered as pure public goods. This is the case of Common Pool Resources, rivals and not excludables. Because of the lack of property rights definition in protected areas, State intervention is allowed. This fact is viewed under the Institutional Economics analysis of Property Rights conducted by Coase, Alchian and Demsetz. At a national level, protected areas use to be financed by the State. But in previous recent years, this trend is world while decreasing. In Colombia, others natural resources conservation initiatives
by indigenous and Afro communities has showed their success and received support by national and international private environmental organisations. This milestone leads to the creation of new environmental management alliances: intersectorial, private-public partnership and among social actors. In this document it is analysed an Environmental
Policy‘s economic instrument: Conservation Trust Funds and specially the Colombian Conservation Trust Fund of Biodiversity and Protected Areas –Patrimonio Natural, in Spanish established in December 2005. This economic instrument is an efficient tool that gives greater confidence to donors, increases the financial performance in protected areas and develops a conservationist synergy among economic agents. Future challenges of this tool are to increase the economic patrimony for the preservation of more Colombian representative ecosystems through new financial agreements, to build a
wide network of agents with conservationist behaviour and to be the fundamental basis for a conscientious economic valuation of this public good.

Archaeologists seek to understand the dynamics of life in past communities while public archaeologists embrace community participation in archaeology or make heritage a catalyst for community economic progress.  Our theoretical understanding of the roots of collaboration within communities, whether past or present, is limited, however. Archaeology needs theories to frame understanding of the personal and contextual factors that motivate individual actors to collaborate when conditions require collective action. This paper reviews how developing theories of collective action have been applied in pre-historic, historical and public archaeology and assesses the limitations and potential of those theories for future research and practice.

During the last few decades there has been a strong tendency towards privatisation of land tenure to in-crease protection and sustainable use of natural resources. We assess this approach in the context of land privatisation in a dry region of the Argentine Chaco where low income peasants depend on multiple common-pool resources (CPRs) to survive and where most recently privatisation of land tenure has also included large absentee landowners. We hypothesise that the results of such policies depend in part on the mobility of the resources in question, and compare the harvesting practices of CPRs of varied mobil-ity before and after the conversion of land to private property to assess the effects of privatisation. We found that privatisation by low income peasants increased control of access to stationary and low mobil-ity CPRs but highly mobile species continued being used as open access and over-exploited. In contrast, the later privatisation of land by large absentee landowners is ...

This study combines three interconnected streams in tourism literature: analysis of the utilisation of common pool resources (CPR) in tourism, studies on sustainable tourism development and theoretical contributions to the articulation of roles, missions and strategies of a destination management organisation (DMO). Starting from an integrative literature review, our aim is to explore the symbiotic relationships between these approaches in order to design a conceptual framework for opening new research opportunities. The operational application of such a conceptual model depends on the resources of each destination, the type of tourism dynamics observed, the specific stakeholders involved and the power balance between them. Our objective is to define and to discuss the critical conditions for the integration of sustainable development principles into the strategic role of a DMO through the management of CPR via participatory processes of destination management. An exploratory illustration of this framework for the rural destination of Kushiro-Akan (Hokkaido, Japan) is presented. Policy and managerial implications as well as the needs for further research are discussed.

On Pyrenean pastures, customary rights continue to structure access to land and management of pastoral resources. How does collective management of pastoral lands and resources work today? Who are the owners of customary rights? What issues and logics underline these rights? The study of customary rights on pastoral lands inform us about current realities and issues of pyrenean pastoralism, which faces private interests, multiple-use issues and public policy reforms. This analysis also highlights the threats to these complex social and natural systems.
Sur les pâturages pyrénéens, les droits d’usage continuent de structurer les modalités d’accès à l’espace et la gestion des ressources pastorales. Comment se structure la gestion collective des estives sur le massif des Pyrénées aujourd’hui ? Qui sont les détenteurs des droits d’usage ? Comment ces droits sont-ils investis ou réinvestis, selon quelles logiques et avec quels enjeux ? L’analyse des formes que prennent ces droits d’usage, des luttes dont ils sont l’objet et l’étendard à l’échelle des estives pyrénéennes nous informent sur les réalités actuelles et sur le rapport à la terre qui fondent le pastoralisme pyrénéen. Elle met également en lumière les menaces (intérêts économiques exogènes, réformes des dispositifs publics, etc.) qui pèsent sur ces équilibres naturels et sociaux complexes.

We investigate the decision rules adopted by individuals in local communities, whose livelihoods depend on common pool resource stocks and who face the cooperation dilemma in their everyday life. For this purpose, field experiments are modeled and the model structure and output are confronted with experimental data and with the relevant theory of collective action proposed by Ostrom (1998) [Ostrom, E., 1998. A behavioral approach to the rational choice theory of collective action. American Political Science Review 92 (1), 1–22.]. The field experiments analyze the cooperative action among coastal communities in Providence Island (Colombian Caribbean Sea). The simulation model is built according to the principles and methods of System Dynamics. The model formalizes the feedback causality among reputation, trust and reciprocity Ostrom (1998) [Ostrom, E., 1998. A behavioral approach to the rational choice theory of collective action. American Political Science Review 92 (1), 1–22.]. Moreover, based on the payoff structure and treatments used in the experiments, it considers other behavioral factors such as temptation to free ride, profit maximization, awareness and risk perception of the individuals in feedback perspective. Model behavior replicates the patterns in the experimental data and is highly sensitive to reciprocity and free-riding behavior. It reveals path-dependent characteristic to the initial trust of the individuals in the group. The variables and decision rules built into the model structure provide the basis for a dialogue between the theories of collective action and future experimental designs to test and improve such theories.

La autoconstrucción de viviendas en Marinaleda (Andalucía, España) es un caso pionero y muy próximo a otras experiencias de Producción Social del Hábitat (PSH), con las que comparte parámetros de autogestión, ayuda mutua y propiedad colectiva. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el fenómeno en su contexto, que incluye otras políticas del Ayuntamiento, el papel del gobierno regional (Junta de Andalucía), el contexto sociodemográfico de la población y su mercado laboral, y el contexto político de un pueblo que ha destacado por mantener un proceso sostenido de lucha social y por sus formas de democracia participativa y auto-organización asamblearia. Desde el punto de vista empírico nos basamos en un largo trabajo de observación participante, gracias a la labor de una de las autoras como Arquitecta Municipal de Marinaleda, y en el análisis documental. Usando el marco teórico institucionalista sobre los bienes comunes de Ostrom, aplicamos los principios de diseño institucional de la autora al caso de Marinaleda. Concluimos que estos principios rigen de forma muy similar y ayudan a comprender el éxito de la autoconstrucción en Marinaleda, lo que invita a extender el ámbito de aplicación de la teoría a distintos tipos de bienes más allá de los recursos naturales.

Les systèmes sociaux complexes étudiés par Elinor Ostrom et les chercheurs associés caractérisent souvent des réseaux de petite ou de moyenne échelle, tant pour des ressources matérielles qu’informationnelles. Mais d’un point de vue citoyen, les outils, institutions des collectifs sociopolitiques (appelés école, voirie publique, hôpitaux, universités , etc.) peuvent-ils être pensés sous l’angle des ressources communes et, à ce titre, donner lieu à l’émergence d’une gouvernance participative, en étant vus comme à préserver par les concernés ? Pour favoriser une telle lecture, il nous faut clarifier quelques apports de l’école d’Ostrom, amorcer une analyse sociale des composantes d’une gouvernance des communs fondée sur la participation et identifier certaines questions à creuser ultérieurement, notamment les problèmes posés dans le cadre d’une économie largement financiarisée et abstraite des besoins matériels les plus immédiats.

The effectiveness of forest governance practices has consequences that range from the local to the global level. In general, the study of community forest governance relies heavily on case-study materials. The strength of single case and small-N comparative studies is related to the ability to uncover the nuances of time and place specific particularities. A recognized weakness of this approach relates to the fact that results cannot easily be extrapolated. For my analysis, I use a large-N, cross-national dataset instead. What constitutes an effective local forest governance regime? I show that especially monitoring – and to a lesser extent, maintenance – is correlated with improving forest conditions. When are effective governance regimes likely to emerge? I show that social capital, organization, leadership and autonomy contribute to the development of institutions for collective action. How does competition between forest users affect governance? I provide empirical evidence that two-level collective action dilemmas hinder the emergence of effective governance regimes.

The governance of community forests requires that resource appropriators overcome collective action dilemmas. Often, forest communities appear unable to do this. External actors then present themselves to help. Inducing the organization of communities through external actors is common practice in development efforts in general, and in community forestry programs, in particular. Does external-agent involvement affect the likelihood of durable collective action at the local level? We apply criteria associated with durable collective action to six communities in Maharashtra, India, with varying levels of external-actor involvement in the organization of committees. Our results show that although there is a (weak) correlation between external-agent involvement and expected durability of local collective action, such interventions do not appear to straightforwardly lead to the emergence of durable forms of collective action in communities where it didn't previously exist.

Special iSSue 2013 electronic Government. pp. 137-171 Gestión y política pública 137 this article analyzes information and communication technologies (icts) as a common pool resource. using the institutional analysis and Development framework (iad) the article analyzes the case of telecommunication investment at the municipal level in mexico. the article develops a game theory model showing the need for inter municipal coordination and cooperation. in a market with a monopolistic provider of telecommunications, municipalities need to coordinate in order to receive high payments from their investment in information technologies (it). the article also defines digital poverty lines and presents a probit estimation of its determinants. it presents cases of ict access in eight municipalities in oaxaca, mexico. the article makes policy proposals for a municipal telecommunication fund that

This article aims to confront a set of analyses that have been developed over the last 30  years in the field of natural resources management, and more specifically in the water management sector. After having reported on the way the conceptual debate is structured nowadays – through repeated references to the notions of ‘natural capital’ and ‘common good’ – we will introduce the concept of ‘common patrimony’, to highlight the need to jointly deal with allocation and governance of natural resources.

This article examines "fundos de pasto" (FPs) – a land use system that combines individual and collective appropriation of resources, evaluating its prospects in a rapidly modernizing economy. FPs are ancient and commonly held agricultural and animal husbandry lands located in the Brazilian Northeast Region. Aggressive land grabbing practices in the 1970s and 1980s and resistance of FP communities led to the formal acknowledgment of FPs by the state. Data were obtained via individual interviews, workshops with stakeholders, archival materials from government agencies, and secondary studies. Our findings reinforce the perception of the sustainability and higher resistance of these communities in years of severe droughts. Despite their time-tested sustainability, recently FPs have been under pressure that may lead to overgrazing, such as reduced grazing areas (on account of land grabbing), population growth, larger herds, credit operations that stimulate the substitution of  grazing on native vegetation, and increasingly serious droughts. Our findings also indicate the existence of tensions between economic development and the sustainability of common resource use systems associated with the conservation of extensive areas. Understanding these tensions requires attention to the dimension of farmers' political organization, a perspective that goes beyond the measurement of social capital. 

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag widmet sich der Untersuchung der fundos de pasto (FPs), einem Landnutzungssystem, in dem in-dividuelle und gemeinschaftliche Nutzungen von Ressourcen kombiniert werden. Dieses soll im Hinblick auf seine Zukunftsaussichten in einer sich rapide modernisierenden Wirtschaft betrachtet werden. FPs sind alte, gemeinschaftlich verwaltete landwirtschaftliche bzw. viehwirtschaftliche Nutzflächen im Nordosten Brasi-liens. Aggressive Praktiken des Land Grabbing in den 1970ern und 1980er Jahren sowie der Widerstand der FP-Gemeinschaften führten zur formellen Anerkennung der fundos de pasto. Zur Datengewinnung wurden in-dividuelle Interviews, Workshops mit beteiligten Akteuren, Archivmaterial von Regierungsbehörden sowie Sekundärliteratur verwendet. Unsere Ergebnisse bestätigen die Annahme der Nachhaltigkeit und höheren Re-sistenz in Jahren starker Dürre. Trotz ihrer säkularen Nachhaltigkeit stehen die FPs unter großem Druck, derzu Überweidung führen kann, zum Beispiel in Form reduzierter Ausdehnung von Weidegründen in Folge von Landraub, Bevölkerungswachstum, größerer Herden, Kreditvergabepraktiken, die als Anreiz für die Umwandlung natürlicher Weidevegetationsflächen wirken, sowie durch zunehmend schwere Dürren. Unsere Ergebnisse weisen zudem auf Spannungen zwischen der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung und der Nachhaltigkeit von gemeinschaftlichen Nutzungssystemen hin, die meist mit der Erhaltung großer Landflächen einhergehen. Um diese Spannungen zu verstehen, muss das Augenmerk auf die politische Organisation der Bauern gelegt werden und
somit über die Methode der Messung von Sozialkapital hinausgegangen werden.

The governance of common-pool resources can be meaningfully examined from the somewhat broader perspective of the governance of social-ecological systems (SESs). Governance of SESs invariably involves trade-offs; trade-offs between different stakeholder objectives, trade-offs between risk and productivity, and trade-offs between short-term and long-term goals. This is especially true in the case of robustness in social-ecological systems-ie the capacity to continue to meet a performance objective in the face of ...

Design is a fundamental human activity through which we attempt to navigate and
manipulate the world around us for our survival, pleasure, and benefit. As human
society has evolved, so too has the complexity and impact of our design activities
on the environment. Now clearly intertwined as a complex social-ecological system
at the global scale, we struggle in our ability to understand, design, implement, and
manage solutions to complex global issues such as climate change, water scarcity,
food security, and natural disasters. Some have asserted that this is because complex
adaptive systems, like these, are moving targets that are only partially designed and
partially emergent and self-organizing. Furthermore, these types of systems are di-
cult to understand and control due to the inherent dynamics of "wicked problems",
such as uncertainty, social dilemmas, inequities, and trade-os involving multiple
feedback loops that sometimes cause both the problems and their potential solutions
to shift and evolve together. These problems do not, however, negate our collective
need to effectively design, produce, and implement strategies that allow us to
appropriate, distribute, manage and sustain the resources on which we depend. Design, however, is not well understood in the context of complex adaptive systems
involving common-pool resources. In addition, the relationship between our attempts
at control and performance at the system-level over time is not well understood
either. This research contributes to our understanding of design in common-pool resource systems by using a multi-methods approach to investigate longitudinal data
on an innovative participatory design intervention implemented in nineteen small-scale, farmer-managed irrigation systems in the Indrawati River Basin of Nepal over
the last three decades. The intervention was intended as an experiment in using
participatory planning, design, and construction processes to increase food security
and strengthen the self-suffciency and self-governing capacity of resource user groups within the poorest district of Nepal. This work is the first time that theories of participatory design-processes have been empirically tested against longitudinal data on a number of small-scale, locally managed, common-pool resource systems. It clarifies and helps to develop a theory of design in this setting for both scientific and practical purposes.
i

This thesis has five self-contained essays. The titles and the abstracts of the various essays are as follows. Paper 1: Natural Resource use Conflict: Gold Mining in Tropical Rainforest in Ghana: Gold is frequently mined in rainforests that can provide either gold or forest benefits, but not both. This conflict in resource use occurs in Ghana, a developing country in the tropics where the capital needed for mining is obtained from foreign direct investment (FDI). We use a dynamic model to show that an ad valorem severance tax on gross revenue can be used to internalize environmental opportunity costs. The optimal tax must equal the ratio of marginal benefits from forest use to marginal benefits from gold extraction. Furthermore, the tax should increase (decrease) when adjusted net return on all other assets in the economy is higher (lower) than the growth in the price of gold. Empirical results suggest that the 3 percent tax rate currently used in Ghana is too low to fully represent...

Chilean salmon farming has been considered as an outstanding example of success after growing at two digit rates for more than twenty years. With further insight, we now know that such rapid process of expansion came at the expense of sanitary and environmental deterioration. The outbreak of ISA- a viral disease that kills salmon - in 2008 has made this utterly clear. The overexploitation of the 'common' - pristine waters - upon which the industry operates, and the lack of an adequate regulatory mechanism monitoring environmental impact contributed to a gradual - but not always adequately perceived - long term decay of industry performance. The paper shows that industries based on the exploitation of a CPR - common pool resource - require a quite different analytical approach than the one conventional neoclassical theory offers us for the understanding of firm and industry behavior. Our study shows that industries of this sort require location specific know how and R&D effor...

Greater willingness to engage in ethical dialog over alternative ways to understand the ethics of soil can both clarify soil management goals and sharpen unspoken differences of perspective that may lead to conflict or unintended consequences. The chapter provides a provisional “first draft” inventory of the way that ethical language is used in ways that bear on soil management and stewardship. First, ethical considerations motivate action in three distinct contexts: acts of single individuals such as farmers; collective (but often informal) management of soils as common pool resources; and finally in the justification of public policy. In each of these domains, it is possible to conceptualize soil management as a means or instrument for achieving more fundamental ends, such as fulfilling duties to other people or future generations or finding the optimal distribution of goods and evils in the form of human sustenance and environmental insult. It may also be possible to move beyond ...