4 - Control and use rights

Summary

In this chapter we unpack the bundle of rights concept by exploring three categories of rights: direct use, use entitlements and control. Theoretically we could explore the idea of control entitlements, but we will leave that for another day. We begin by building on our collective action framing from Chapter 1 by discussing the nature of control rights (institutional design, allocation and enforcement) as public goods. A well designed environmental property regime isn't free: someone has to design it and implement it, and others will have incentives to free-ride on costly governance activities.

From here, the majority of the chapter focuses on use rights. In Chapter 2, we questioned a common framing of the commons as being subtractable: if someone uses a forest, this means someone else cannot. But as we saw, this depends on what we mean by “use”. Thus how we understand environmental use has implications for how we frame the main challenges to be addressed by environmental rights. A common theme we will see is that use of the environment is a common way to also establish ownership (e.g., squatting is a way of establishing access rights), which itself is an allocation right. In this way, use and allocation rights intersect. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of use entitlements, or the indirect benefits that actors can claim based on how the environment is used by themselves or someone else.

Design, allocation and enforcement as public goods

The control rights of institutional design and enforcement confer power and responsibility. The development and enforcement of rules to enact use rights can be thought of as public goods: they may benefit a whole group, but are costly to provide. Thinking again of the Dominican fishing village, if the fishers could agree to a set of rules about fishing rights and obtain some degree of compliance, they could all benefit from a sustainable fishery. But who is going to make the effort to achieve this? The provision of enforced social institutions is a second-order collective action problem since individuals have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others to craft and enforce institutions. Previously we have discussed first-order collective action problems, such as the problem of overusing a shared resource.