What are Common Property Resources? Explained

Introduction
What are Common Property Resources?
Types of rights
Types of users
Institutional factors
The Nature of rights
Common Property and Common Pool Resources:
Common property and open-access

Introduction

Our survival depends on a variety of resources. Being surrounded by them is not enough; it is also crucial to have some degree of control over the available resources. For example, a mango tree in the backyard is useless if one is not permitted to pick its mangoes. If one cannot raise crops to meet demands, a farm is useless. Any form of resource ownership aids in gaining the control essential for managing them and for implementing the necessary modifications to produce goods from them. A culturally accepted method of inheritance can also be used to pass ownership down from one generation to the next, guaranteeing that the following generation will continue to control the resource to the same extent.

The concept of property ownership has played a crucial role in the cultural evolution of humanity. In the modern world, private ownership of resources is thought to be the most desirable form, and it is actively pushed. Property rights have been a topic of intense debate for many philosophers and economists, including Adam Smith, a pioneering political economist. Capitalism is based on the fundamental premise that property rights enable owners to develop their properties to create wealth and to allocate resources effectively according to the dictates of the market. The notion, however, is founded on private property, which is real estate owned by an individual and, frequently, a family. Nevertheless, it is difficult to treat and control critical resources as private property, with the exception of land. Water, wind, sunlight, forests, and biodiversity are much more complicated resources and cannot be governed by the same laws that regulate private property. This raises the question of how these important resources have been managed by people. The solutions can be found in how local communities manage their natural resources. These communities created complex systems for how resources could be owned jointly and managed as a common resource.

What are Common Property Resources?

Common Property Resources are typically non-exclusive resources whose usage rights are shared by a number of co-owners, who are typically defined by their status as community members.

Elinor Ostrom, an economist who won the Nobel Prize, conducted groundbreaking research on common property resources. Numerous common property regimes governing the use of natural resources by communities have been identified by researchers. Common property resources in a village include shared grazing fields, shared threshing sites, shared woodlands, shared rivers and riverbeds, shared ponds, shared beaches, and even shared marine areas. Resources that belong to everyone can be exploited by both individuals and groups. The community itself establishes the standards of use, and cultural traditions are used to uphold them. Additionally, disputes are settled by means of collective decision-making.

Types of rights

Natural resource management frequently combines common and private property regimes, where the laws grant various rights of use and property management to individuals and organisations within the community. For instance, anyone may fish in the neighbourhood pond, but the community determines the days when it is permitted. Rights must be properly understood since they enable an individual or society to govern the resource.

Schlager and Ostrom (1992) assert that several sorts of rights are involved in resource management.

Access: The right to access a resource E.g. Entry in a forest patch, access to a pond
Withdrawal: The right to obtain the "products" of a resource E.g. fishing, fuelwood and fodder collection
Management: The right to regulate internal use patterns and transform the resource by making improvements or other changes. E.g. introducing a certain type of fish in a pond, planting useful trees in the forest, or clearing weeds etc.
Exclusion: The right to determine who will have access rights as well as how that right may be transferred.
For instance, the neighbourhood might vote to forbid outsiders from fishing in its pond or gathering fruit from the village forest. These decisions, which are binding on the members, may be made by a body with authority, such as a community council. However, there may also be collective-choice rights, which allow an individual to participate in the decision-making process and alter the rules through group decisions. This is possible either directly or through an elected representative. For instance, the entire community may opt to prohibit hunting for a particular season. The villages are effectively self-regulating.
Alienation: The right to sell or lease collective-choice rights, such as the type discussed earlier
Typically, locals will seek cash before awarding a fishing contract to an organisation or individual.

There are numerous instances of individuals and organisations possessing one or more of these rights over various resources. But there are a few things that should be remembered.

Rules that authorise or demand acts in exercising each right that a human possesses exist (to property). The regulations may specify when or how much of a resource may be used.
Every right has corresponding obligations. This guarantees that people will keep caring for the resources.
Anyone who possesses a right owes it to others to uphold it in a reasonable manner. The community's members will be aware of the various rights they each have. Each person's rights must be respected by the others.

These rights were typically passed down through inheritance in a way that was influenced by culture. Therefore, if a family has been fishing in a body of water, the next generation will likewise inherit the privilege of doing so. This right must be acknowledged and respected by others.

According to McKeen (1995), common property is a technique to privatise the use of a resource without having to divide it into separate ownership. Owners of resources are encouraged by common property to invest in resource quality, manage their resources, and do so in a way that is long-term efficient and sustainable. So, if a town is certain it will have access to forest resources, it will be motivated to use those resources wisely so that future generations can also benefit.

Types of users

Depending on the rights that different people or groups enjoy, a broad classification can be created.

Authorized users are those who have access and withdrawal privileges. Access and withdrawal privileges may be permanently or transiently granted to others (as in a lease agreement) (when such rights are assigned or sold to others). Others who possess collective-choice powers of management and exclusion define the rights of authorised users. Fishermen, fuel or fodder collectors are a few examples in this group.
Claimants are those who have management rights as well as access and withdrawal rights. The claimants are able to jointly decide and create withdrawal rights since they have collective-choice authority. Members of a Joint Forest Management Committee, for instance, can choose how and when to use forest resources.
Proprietors are people who have the ability to manage and exclude others through collective choice. Owners are able to control who has access to resources and how they are used. A village's Panchayat, for instance, has the authority to decide whether to bar residents from the outside from using the village's forest resources.
The right of alienation is possessed by those who have the rights mentioned here. This indicates that they have the option to sell or rent their collective choice rights if they have been identified as the owners. The highest class of rights is this one. Any of the aforementioned rights are subject to government decision-making, and it is even permitted to sell use rights to third parties.

Institutional factors

There must be rules governing the use and management of a resource that belongs to everyone.

Institutions that permit and protect use by a specific user group (to the exclusion of others),
Institutions that establish the regulations governing this use, carry out the rules, and keep track of compliance.

As a result, it is clear that common property systems can only work if the group is structured—or can organise itself—to define and enforce such norms and offer individual members inputs and services that are more effective when organised collectively. It must also offer an appropriate means of communication and negotiation with the government and other outside parties.

A council of elders, regarded as wise people by all, may exist in a hamlet. These elders will decide how much of the forest produce can be harvested or where to open the rivers to fishing, among other things. In north-east India, village elders advise the village head on matters such as where to practise shifting agriculture and how to control water flow in hill streams. Criminals who break the law may be penalised or subject to other penalties. There may be inherent inequities in certain of the village's systems, which may be caste- or community-specific. Parts of the river can be partitioned for caste-based use in various Indian villages. Due to cultural advantages conferred by caste, class, or gender, some people may have access to more resources of greater quality.

The Nature of rights

Most of the time, people who use natural resources or a community decided their own rights and made laws to uphold them. Everyone in the community respected and upheld these rights. Offenders were dealt with by the community as a whole. If the State does not recognise these rights, they are "de facto" rights. Although unwritten, these rights are commonly regarded as being a part of cultural norms. For instance, the limits of nearby communities' pasture or forest holdings are well-known and recognised despite not being on any maps. Only inside their village's bounds did the inhabitants have the privilege to graze. Many of the rights to natural resources were and are "de facto," or determined solely by the facts. Some of the rights were acknowledged by the government as the State's organisation and power grew. Government officials may enforce these rights in accordance with laws that expressly permit the provision of such rights to resource users. These rights can then be defended in a court of law and are known as "de jure" rights. As a typical illustration of "de jure" rights, the Indian Forest Act permits the government to designate certain forest portions as "village forests" for villager usage. By designating the patches as "protected woods," the same statute can be used to eliminate these very rights. Today, written laws govern many facets of life and dictate how we might use a resource. De facto rights of use are feasible, but without de jure rights, they are disputed and cannot be upheld in a court of law. For instance, a forest patch might have been used by locals for many generations, but if the area is designated as a "reserve forest," the government has the power to forbid access or even lease it to another party. De facto rights must therefore become de jure in the modern world if they are to be upheld by those outside the community.

Common Property and Common Pool Resources:

Common Property is a legal framework that bestows a range of rights on a group of people. On the other hand, a common pool refers to a class of resources that cannot be managed as private property, either as sole ownership because the cost of ownership is too expensive or as subdivided units since the resource is not divisible. Common pool resources can also be described as ones where it is challenging to keep track of how a specific group is using them, yet the removal of one agent affects (depletes) the share of the others. Wildlife and subsurface oil or water aquifers are two examples of common pool resources. These resources are difficult to conceptualise as discrete units.

Common property and open-access

Access to certain types of property is restricted to a particular group of people who share certain rights. Each group member may own one or more of the five different categories of rights. Open-access, however, might not have a clearly defined user base (because anybody can access it) or usage guidelines. Resources with open access frequently become misused since there are no limitations. The urge to start a governance structure is driven by concern for the future of a resource.

Tragedy of common

All villages may have access to a forest as long as they go by a set of unwritten guidelines for using it, such as not felling specific tree species or taking more than one headload of fuelwood. The regulations, however, might occasionally be loosely followed or even ignored. Over time, community institutions can have deteriorated. In such cases, people use the resources solely for their own personal gain, without any consideration for the consequences.

A biologist named Garrett Hardin published a piece titled "Tragedy of the Commons" in 1968. (Hardin, 1968). He described a scenario in which resources can be openly accessible, or are "open access," leading to individual over-exploitation. Hardin used a fictitious English common grazing area as an example to highlight overgrazing. If each herdsman has the incentive to raise the number of animals he grazes in order to optimise his or her own returns, he or she claimed. Therefore, since the resources in the commons are limited, maximising grazing will eventually drain and destroy the commons. Each herdsman's gain from expanding his herd more than covers his part of the cost resulting from the harm to the commons. All of the grazers will ultimately lose because they all follow the same individual-centric mentality. Hardin likened this unavoidable outcome to a classic Greek tragedy in which all involved are aware that a catastrophe is coming but are unable to stop it. To prevent such a calamity, he promoted private or governmental control and appropriate decision-making procedures. Hardin was describing "unregulated open access" use in a hypothetical setting. But his approach was viewed as being applicable to any circumstance involving the shared use of a resource. Common property resources were seen as being vulnerable to overexploitation, and many pushed for some kind of nationalisation or privatisation.

In terms of the management and control of forests and other natural resources, Hardin's hypothesis has a significant and enduring influence on political and economic theory, practise, and policy. It served as justification for the adoption of land distribution policies that supported individual private landholdings as well as state management of forest resources in order to ensure their protection and beneficial use. Hardin was criticised by Ostrom and her colleagues for failing to comprehend the complexity of regulated commons, making generalisations based on scant observations, and for being unable to comprehend and appreciate the vast body of knowledge about how communities manage and self-regulate the use of resources and take decisions that are 'in the interest of the community' rather than indulge selfish desires. It's interesting to note that even though Hardin came to recognise his flaws in later years, many people still support private ownership of natural resources rather than realising the advantages of collective ownership.

Changing ownership of natural resources

Varied nations have seen different rates of privatisation or government control over natural resources. In several places of the world, notably India, colonisation sped it up. Legislation that granted "de jure" rights whenever possible—even when they conflicted with "de facto" rights—was used to hasten the process. The "de facto" rights of the communities that relied on NTFPs and hunting in the forests for survival were essentially nullified whenever the British government passed legislation to seize control of forests or to conserve animals. Due to several rules ensuring that all other resources, like as water, crops, woods, etc., were bound to the land on which they were situated, ownership of the land became a matter of utmost importance. User rights used to take precedence over land ownership. However, during the colonial era, it was understood that the owner of the land would also be the owner of all of its resources. This implied that the owner had the power to restrict access to and utilisation of the resources. Since the land and the resources it contained belonged to the state, government, which stood in for the colonial power, became the largest property owner. Law granted certain rights to resource users, but these rights could be revoked or suspended at any time. Alternatives to shared property management could not be viable on their own. Individual private use, especially in low-productivity areas, which are typical of many common property resources, can result in overuse and degradation. The state might not be able to control use and stop degeneration in such circumstances. Privatization is unlikely to increase resource utilization's effectiveness. Privatization is likely to make the issues of those without access to the resource worse since it gives control of the resource to a small group of people who can then exclude others with legal and social support.