Part II - Bundles of rights

Summary

I have stated that a primary goal of this book is to document the institutional diversity of environmental property rights. In this section of the book, we have this goal squarely in mind. We will be unpacking what we might mean when we talk about ownership of the environment and the concept of a bundle of rights that I mentioned in the introduction. This section builds most directly on our previous discussions of specific rights, namely exclusion and alienation, as well as principles for rights allocation such as the proximity principle from Chapter 2. We also will maintain our collective action framing and consider its applicability when understanding the challenges associated with the design, allocation and enforcement of rights.

I think one of the reasons why we don't always dive into the tricky details of what exactly it means to own something is because it requires more analytical grunt work, and we cannot as easily make policy pronouncements based on these details. My hope for this section is that it helps the reader understand the diversity of arrangements that we might be referring to when we loosely talk about property rights or “rights-based” policies. Saying that property rights are important is just the beginning, even if it is often treated as a conclusion.

To motivate this discussion, let's return to the situation in the Dominican fisheries that I described in Chapter 1. The fishers in the Dominican Republic have been depleting their local resources, in part because the fishery is nearly open access with few constraints on use. If I’m in one of the fishing villages where my local partners work, and I tell the fishers that we should develop a system of environmental property rights to better manage the declining fishery, there are points that would need to be clarified. First, some fishers might argue that certain types of fishing should not be allowed, such as use of the compressors mentioned in Chapter 1, since these enable greater fishing pressure, and are also dangerous to use. Gear restrictions are an example of expressing environmental use rights.