Part III - Property regimes and policy panaceas

Summary

In this final part of the book, we will discuss two interrelated ideas: property regimes and policy panaceas. An environmental property regime refers to the type of actor claiming ownership over the environment. A policy panacea is a public policy that is promoted as a fix for a type of problem, regardless of case-based and political context. The connection between them comes from the fact that all policy panaceas with respect to environmental property rights are based on assumptions about property regimes.

We begin our discussion by unpacking the elements and enabling factors of policy panaceas in Chapter 6. From here, in Chapter 7 we move to one of the most important distinctions with respect to property regimes: individual rights versus common property. These are often thought of as being mutually exclusive, but as we will see in this chapter, they are not, and their relationship has multiple elements to it. Building on this, in Chapter 8 we discuss the meaning of public property and consider the role of the state in environmental governance. We also consider a relative newcomer to the property regime discourse: nature itself. Finally, we question the significance of property regimes as a broad way of classifying complex realities, and we introduce the idea of a hybrid property regime to help make sense of this complexity. We conclude Part III in Chapter 9 with a discussion of market policies as an example of a hybrid property regime, and maybe the most prominent example of environmental policy panaceas.