Our ability to work together or not has a dramatic impact on our ability to resolve any environmental problem. We therefore begin by exploring the concept of collective action, or cooperation. The theory of collective action has been developed in multiple independent disciplines. The perspective of evolutionary theory frames collective action as a mystery: why would individuals cooperate with each other when it is individually costly and publicly beneficial? In environmental studies, the failure to act collectively is associated with the tragedy of the commons, or environmental ruin.

The first chapter in this part deals with the tragedy of the commons as the dominant framing for environmental property rights. Here we will also interrogate the utility of this framing and consider others as well. Chapter 2 builds directly on Chapter 1 by asking how social and ecological boundaries can facilitate cooperation and address the tragedy of the commons. In this chapter we also consider the different types of boundaries that we see and what function they play. Finally, in Chapter 3 we turn to the primary mechanisms for cooperation among humans or any species: reciprocity and kinship. We will also see that the human psychologies of reciprocity and kinship can be used to motivate environmental stewardship and reframe the Western perspective on environmental property rights.

In the previous chapter, we discussed how intergroup competition promotes within-group cooperation. But this is not the only thing needed for cooperation; we must also consider mechanisms that develop and maintain cooperation within groups. The two most well-established mechanisms for enabling cooperation across all species are kinship and reciprocity. We have already touched on reciprocity in the previous chapter.

A large scientific controversy persists over whether intergroup competition and the selection of cooperation at the level of groups, as discussed in Chapter 2, or reciprocity and kinship are the primary factors that enable cooperation. As an outsider to the academic communities involved, my interpretation is that this controversy is in part due to the very same tribal instincts we discussed in Chapter 2: often the easiest way to identify yourself as belonging to a group is to clarify that you don't like “them” and what they’re doing and thinking. In his discussion of the mathematical equivalence between group selection and kinship-based selection, Wilson (2016) – arguably the primary proponent of group-based selection through his multilevel selection framework – has argued that these mechanisms do not need to be seen as mutually exclusive. My interpretation is that cooperation requires the identification of an in-group to ensure that the costs of cooperation are recouped, and that kinship and reciprocity are the two primary mechanisms for this identification. In this chapter, we discuss each of these as mechanisms for establishing and maintaining cooperation, as a means for establishing property rights, and as a way to fundamentally change how we view nature and environmental rights to nature.

Kinship and reciprocity closely relate to the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values. Intrinsic values come from the inside, and need no external reinforcement; extrinsic values are only instrumental, and without external reinforcement, will fade. The dominant Western discourse about property rights and public policy has mostly neglected intrinsic value. This is in part due to an abridged understanding of the nature of human actors as only responding to extrinsic incentives (Bowles 2016). I believe that another reason for this is that certain aspects of intrinsic motivation are harder to implement at scale, which is an inherent goal of any public policy.

This chapter pulls together content from several previous chapters to discuss arguably the most popular type of property-based policies: markets. We have already discussed markets through our examination of exchange rights in Chapter 5. There we associated exchange with reciprocity, establishing trade as a culturally ubiquitous phenomenon. As such we need to distinguish “markets”, which include informal exchange and are found everywhere but are less legible to state actors, with market-based policies, which are public policies that include the allocation of exchange rights and are our subject for this chapter. In Chapter 5 we also considered the goals of equity and efficiency that are a strong part of the dominant market discourse. Efficiency is a primary theoretical motivation for most market-based policies, and so we build further on that discussion here.

In Chapter 6, we introduced the idea of a policy panacea, which we will reflect on a fair amount in this chapter, since the market-based policies we will discuss in this chapter have often received the panacea treatment from their promoters. In Chapter 8 we introduced the idea of a hybrid property regime involving multiple types of actors, each with its own set of rights. In this chapter we unpack market policies as their own kind of hybrid property regime, commonly involving a state actor (or in some cases an NGO) with control rights and resource users with use and exchange rights.

We will explore three types of market-based environmental policies, based on O’Donnell's (2018) classification: (1) public goods markets (e.g., PES policies, conservation easements, certifications); (2) tradeable environmental allowances: shared resource markets (e.g., catch shares); and (3) tradeable environmental allowances: regulatory markets (e.g., cap-and-trade). A public goods market involves an external actor paying a local actor for the provision of a public good, based on a formalized evaluation or certification scheme. A prominent example of what O’Donnell (2018) refers to as a public goods market are payment for ecosystem services policies. In this case, money is being exchanged for environmental benefits – such as avoided deforestation – that are framed as public goods, and entitlements are granted to landowners.

Exchange, most broadly, is the act of carrying out our psychology of reciprocity. I give you this, you give me that, or in the case of indirect reciprocity, I give you this so someone else will give me that. Because exchange is a form of cooperation, we can view it as the source of social benefit. Ideally, in the case of direct reciprocity, an exchange produces a win-win outcome between the partners involved, because each partner values what they receive more than what they give up. The potential magic here is that social value is created out of nothing, simply by reallocating resources. This simple, imagined scenario drives a lot of policy discourse and decision-making through phrases like “let the market decide”. What does this mean exactly, and how does exchange of environmental rights promote the public good, or not?

In the previous chapter, we unpacked what it means to use the environment, both directly and indirectly. In this chapter we do the same for exchange: what does it mean to trade in environmental rights? To begin, we continue the discussion of entitlements from the end of the last chapter by discussing the role of exchange entitlements. We do so through the lens of what is referred to as a patron-client relationship, which will have us question a win-win, cooperative framing of exchange.

From here, much of the chapter deals with arguments related to exchange and its relationship to efficiency. Efficiency is the primary theoretical motivation for several market-based environmental policies we will discuss in Chapter 9, so it is worth spending some time grappling with the background. We start by engaging with a dominant discourse that argues that markets promote efficient allocations of resources. To unpack this argument, we explore the relationship between efficiency and equity, which can also be seen as an important allocational principle. After this we explore the relationship between efficiency and stewardship, and explore a hypothesis that efficient markets tend to discount broader social and environmental impacts of exchange. Building on this discussion, we consider the argument that alienation, even if it does not necessarily incentivize stewardship, might incentivize development.

What is a policy panacea? One answer is that it is a solution that has been broadly applied, and panaceas are often talked about as being successful in this way. This is not the same thing as whether the policy is successful in producing the desired outcomes; it may or it may not be. The theory of panaceas I develop in this chapter is agnostic about this second type of success. Rather, the theory developed here is about the features of a policy that enable its spread: its evolutionary success as a panacea. For to spread, policies are often expressed in apolitical, highly legible terms and supported by top-down governance, and at the expense of more extensive cooperation across groups.

In this chapter we are doing two things at once. First, we are unpacking the dimensions that enable the panacea problem that I just mentioned. And in so doing, we discuss key issues of environmental policy analysis. Panaceas are about overgeneralizing, usually beyond the evidence, but how do we think about the trade-offs involved in making generalizations? In the first section of this chapter we tackle that question.

From there, we move on to discuss a set of enabling factors for the spread of a policy panacea, starting with a set of psychological biases and heuristics that we all have, and which lead us to favour the spread of a preferred solution, even in the face of contrary evidence. From here we discuss another social aspect of panaceas, and this comes from the fact that preference for any specific policy is closely related to one's social affiliations, to one's membership in a group. And here we tie this conversation back to our previous discussion of intergroup dynamics and the synergy between intergroup conflict and intragroup cooperation.

In the third section we discuss the role of politics. We have already talked about the role that apolitical framings can play in our discussion of the tragedy of the commons and collective action problems in Chapter 1. Panaceas are likewise often cast as apolitical, technical solutions; this helps them garner support by decision-makers who might feel threatened by the spectre of political controversy.

The goal of this book is to synthesize multiple perspectives and evidence on environmental property rights, and thereby improve understanding and decision-making. I begin this final chapter by reflecting on the methods used to conduct this synthesis. After this, I outline two ways in which we can use this synthesis to make better environmental policy decisions. First, I discuss a process of institutional diagnosis (Ostrom et al. 2007a; Young 2002). This is a process of ascertaining the relevant features of a problem to explore their implications for the design of responses. In the second section below, I describe how this book can be used to diagnose environmental problems by drawing questions from each chapter that we should ask about a problem and its possible solutions. Second, I discuss how expertise depends on the qualities of the expert. Here I am drawing on work by Matson, Clark and Andersson (2016), who describe qualities of effective sustainability leaders. The third and final section in this chapter explores the qualities of the experts who would be making the prescriptions based on these diagnoses.

Methods

Much of the motivation for this book is my perception of the synthesis bottleneck in the study of environmental property rights that results from the siloed nature of research. The goal here was to pull together multiple disciplines to tell a more comprehensive story about the meaning and role of environmental ownership. It is worth reflecting here on the methods that I used and the implications these have for how we should interpret this work. Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom (2010) reflect on the various methods that are used by scholars in the study of environmental commons governance. The types of studies that they consider are found through the pages of this book: individual and comparative case studies, experiments, large-n analyses and synthetic meta-analyses. And the method for the book as a whole is reflected in what Poteete et al. (2010) call a qualitative “narrative synthesis”, with their prime example of this being the well-known work on natural resource management by Baland and Platteau (1996).

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.

To further explore the tragedy of the commons and collective action, we turn to the topic of boundaries. Boundaries are critical for understanding what commons are and how collective action works. In the beginning of his depiction of the pasture and its herdsmen, Hardin (1968: 1244) asks the reader to “picture a pasture open to all”. “Open to all” means an absence of boundaries that would limit access to the pasture. In Governing the Commons, Ostrom (1990) argued for the feasibility of community-based resource management by presenting a set of design principles that can help communities overcome collective action problems involved in managing shared resources. These principles are Ostrom's most famous theoretical contribution to the study of environmental policy and governance. I refer to these throughout this book and a version of them based on my own work (Cox, Arnold & Villamayor-Tomas 2010) is included in the Appendix. Ostrom's first principle (which is divided into two in the Appendix) calls for clear social boundaries around legitimate users to distinguish them from non-users, and for biophysical boundaries around community-owned resources. The combination of social boundaries that define who is in and who is out, and biophysical boundaries indicating which parts of the environment are accessible by those who are “in”, is one way to define environmental property rights.

This chapter explores the importance of social boundaries as a key factor in promoting collective action by looking at the relationship between cooperation within groups and cooperation and conflict between groups. We will see that boundaries play the same role within the context of environmental property as they do in the context of collective action theory. The later parts of the chapter explore different types of boundaries and the roles they play. Here we first explore the difference between rigid and contextual boundaries, and we conclude the chapter with a discussion of general purpose versus special purpose boundaries as a way to understand the concept of common property, or the collective ownership of a resource by a group.

Appendix: Ostrom’s design principles

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.

The fishers in the Dominican Republic are facing the potential collapse of their fishery. The dominant narrative for why this is happening is known as the tragedy of the commons, popularized by Garrett Hardin through an article of the same name (Hardin 1968), although Hardin attributed his inspiration to William Forster Lloyd, a British economist and historian. The tragedy of the commons is the single most common narrative used to motivate the implementation of environmental property rights. In this chapter we discuss how it has been used and how it relates to theories and models of cooperation. We will also explore the limits of the idea by considering what it leaves out: namely, inequalities of power and influence. We conclude by considering additional theories that need to be considered when describing the causes of environmental degradation that need to be accounted for by environmental institutions.

The famous scenario that Hardin got from Lloyd is the one that sticks with most with people who have read his work. It is an image of cows on a pasture, with each herdsman deciding how many cows to place on this pasture. This decision is based on two components. First, the individual benefit the herdsman receives from placing on additional cow on a pasture, and the collective cost to the group if overgrazing occurs – too many cows can overgraze a pasture and degrade it. This collective cost is commonly referred to as a negative externality. The meaning of the term is intuitive: it represents the fact that the costs imposed by an individual on a group are “external” to the individual's decision-making or are not accounted for. The problem, as Hardin sees it, is that if each herdsman follows their own individual interest, the collective interest will suffer. It is called a “tragedy” because everybody loses. This gap between the interest of individuals and the interests of the group is known as a collective action problem, and it is closely related to the free-rider problem, which represents the temptation that participants have to free-ride on the contributions of others towards providing group benefits.

In the previous chapter, we explored the idea of a policy panacea. In this chapter we build on this discussion by unpacking the idea of a property regime, which broadly points to who owns the environment. Because the panaceas that we discuss in this book make assumptions about the actors involved, unpacking the concept of property regimes help us understand policy panaceas.

In this chapter and the next chapter, we will address three interrelated 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?

To begin to answer these questions, this chapter focuses on the difference between individual and common property. And to do this, we need to clarify what we mean by each of these property regimes. Common property is an example of collective property, and means ownership by a community. Collective property can also mean ownership by a non-profit organization, by a corporation, or by a state. Individual property means property by individuals, and is often referred to with the term “private property”. But private property really means ownership by any actor other than the state, and so includes other collective property regimes. There is thus a spectrum of ownership from the most individual to the most collective, and to me the transition to the collective level occurs when we move beyond the household unit, even though households are technically made up of multiple individuals.

Let's return to the hypothetical scenario of the Dominican fishery where I have worked. In Chapters 4 and 5, we explored the different rules that the fishers could use to create a system of property rights. But unasked in those chapters was, should the fishers adopt a more individual or common property regime? A tension exists between individual and common property that reflects the divergence between individual and group interests discussed in Chapter 1. Should rights be granted to individuals for their benefit or to the group for its collective benefit? Or can the two types of ownership work together?

It is not hard to find an article or book that calls for less reductionist approaches to environmental governance, and for a greater recognition of the complexities involved. We hear that we need to move beyond simplistic discourses that favour one solution over another based on our analytical framing and associated professional affiliations. Less addressed is the question, how do we do this? This book is my answer to this question. Specifically, in the following chapters I will explore the complexities of rights-based environmental gov-ernance. The approach is descriptive, asking about what we see in the world; and it is normative, asking why things are the way they are, and if they could be or should be different. I will explore different cultural perspectives on the idea of rights to the environment, and different rights-based policies such as protected areas and market-based policies. I will discuss multiple theories of environmental property and relate these theories to a range of cases to address an ongoing challenge facing the study of environment rights – this being a lack of synthesis across numerous cases and studies, each adding a brick to a house that no one can yet see.

In conducting this synthesis I have in mind the goal to help cultivate a new kind of environmental policy expert: someone who can make sense of a situation by connecting it at once to multiple concepts and cases; who can think of exceptions to a rule and often exceptions to these exceptions; who understands the importance of clarity as well as the unavoidability of ambiguity; and who is sensitized to the multiple aspects of human nature and their own position as an actor in the spaces they inhabit. We must combine these qualities to move us toward better outcomes for the planet and its people.

Seven brothers

Several years ago, I was in a motel in a coastal Dominican fishing village in the province of Monte Cristi, close to the Dominican/Haitian border. I heard a knock on the door. It was a local fisherman who was also a local leader, a man important to the work I was doing and to the work of my local partner, AgroFrontera.

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.

I have stated that a primary goal of this book is to document the institutional diversity of environmental property rights. In this section of the book, we have this goal squarely in mind. We will be unpacking what we might mean when we talk about ownership of the environment and the concept of a bundle of rights that I mentioned in the introduction. This section builds most directly on our previous discussions of specific rights, namely exclusion and alienation, as well as principles for rights allocation such as the proximity principle from Chapter 2. We also will maintain our collective action framing and consider its applicability when understanding the challenges associated with the design, allocation and enforcement of rights.

I think one of the reasons why we don't always dive into the tricky details of what exactly it means to own something is because it requires more analytical grunt work, and we cannot as easily make policy pronouncements based on these details. My hope for this section is that it helps the reader understand the diversity of arrangements that we might be referring to when we loosely talk about property rights or “rights-based” policies. Saying that property rights are important is just the beginning, even if it is often treated as a conclusion.

To motivate this discussion, let's return to the situation in the Dominican fisheries that I described in Chapter 1. The fishers in the Dominican Republic have been depleting their local resources, in part because the fishery is nearly open access with few constraints on use. If I’m in one of the fishing villages where my local partners work, and I tell the fishers that we should develop a system of environmental property rights to better manage the declining fishery, there are points that would need to be clarified. First, some fishers might argue that certain types of fishing should not be allowed, such as use of the compressors mentioned in Chapter 1, since these enable greater fishing pressure, and are also dangerous to use. Gear restrictions are an example of expressing environmental use rights.