Determinants of Cooperation and Management of Local Common Property Resources: Discussion

It has been approximately ten years since the National Academy of Sciences published its important book Common Property Resource Management (1986). This volume, the product of the Panel on Common Property Resource Management, presented both conceptual and case study material on common property regimes around the world. In 1992, a follow-up volume entitled Making the Commons Work: Theory, Practice, and Policy was published (Bromley 1992). The appearance of these two volumes, in some small way, marked a watershed in the way economists and development experts think about property regimes. Indeed, the National Research Council (of the National Academy of Sciences) was asked by the U.S. Agency for International Development to undertake a study of common property regimes precisely because of the prevailing misperceptions in the development community about common property. Development experts were not the only ones to be perplexed. Common property had long been confused with open access by a number of economists writing about the ocean fishery, and of course Garret Hardin became famous with his misnamed "tragedy of the commons." The seminal article on property rights by Demsetz got it wrong as well. In perhaps the most egregious example of sophistry, economists were told that civilization could not occur until the na'ive primitives discovered the marvels of private property and thereupon abandoned communal hunting and gathering to take up agriculture. This "first economic revolution" was considered the sine qua non of the long hard march to modernism (North and Thomas). Happily, the intervening decade has seen a more promising line of conceptual and empirical work on property regimes. Some of this work was inspired by Coase's seminal article on social costs, and some was inspired by the emerging field of law and economics. We now see a large genre of work that seeks to understand the origins of alternative property regimes and to model transitions in property regimes under different circumstances. It is indeed encouraging to note that we have finally moved beyond the Panglossian explanation that property regimes are presumptively efficient and only change when the benefits of change exceed the costs of change-and if no change occurs, then things must be "optimal" as they stand (Demsetz). In these three articles, we see quite interesting efforts to increase our understanding of the evolution of property regimes. The Baland-Platteau article concerns itself with the question of how land assets customarily held under corporate ownership get privatized in the sense of being individually appropriated. I am sorry to say that there is a bit too much Bosrupian population pressure here for my taste. After all, technological change (a borehole) makes some resources (nearby rangeland) suddenly more valuable, and new market opportunities can certainly accomplish the same thing. The interesting question then becomes, are there different institutional responses that follow from these differential perturbations? It seems to make sense that the institutional response would differ if the perturbation were from population pressure rather than from external market prospects for a local resource.