In the previous chapter, I introduced three questions. First, what do we mean when we talk about a particular property regime, such as individual or public or common property? Second, what are the relationships between these types of property? And third, is there evidence that one or another type of property performs better than the others? In this chapter we continue to address these questions by adding more complexity to our discussion by considering the nature and behaviour of state actors with regard to the environment and the other forms of property we have examined.

We begin this chapter by examining the third question about the superiority of any given property regime. Most studies that have looked at this question have compared individual, common, and public property. We review this literature, and conclude that the emphasis on broad categories of ownership has been overblown relative to their importance in explaining outcomes. One reason for this pertains to our first question about the nature of property regimes: broad categories of ownership are not always very meaningful because they are very vague terms, which we problematized in our discussion of generality in Chapter 6. There is a lot of variation within each property regime category relative to the variation between categories, which does not reflect a successful classification scheme. For example, in some cases small-scale corporate property has a lot more in common with common property than with large-scale international corporations. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, much of this analytical cloudiness comes from how bundles of rights are distributed across actors. In the second section of the chapter we discuss how the distribution of bundles of rights complicates the meaning of property regimes.

While much attention has been paid to whether or not one property regime is better than the others, our discussion will point us back to the other two questions: what do we mean when we talk about a specific property regime, and how do regimes relate to each other? We spend the remainder of the chapter answering these two questions in more depth, with a primary focus on the relationships that have existed between states and public property and communities and common property.