COMMON PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

A.C. HEMALATHA

August 2, 2003

Common property resources are village gomal land, community forest, wasteland, watershed drainage and so on. Common property resources serve as important source of livelihood earning in developing countries. In India, the percentage of CPRs to net sown area declined from 30% to 29% since 1970 to 1996.

CPRs are between open access and private property and these property rights suffer from tragedy of the commons. In addition to this population growth, market failure, institutional failure, unsustainable exploitation, technological change, and divergence of social and private discount rate are responsible for resource degradation.

Different regimes for management of CPRs are privatization, state ownership, communal management and participatory management. Privatization may help in conservation if resource scarcity emerges. For State ownership to work efficiently, state must monitor use of resources. Common property management regimes work, when the incentives for community are high. In the case of common property resources sufficient demand, all unrestricted access will cause CPRs to be over exploited. In public goods, inefficiency results as each person is a free rider on others contribution.

Environmental problem arise because of a divergence between individual and collective objectives. A study on management showed that before privatization CPRs are well managed, but after land reforms there has been rapid shrinkage in areas of CPRs, as institutions are weak to manage the resources along with increasing human and livestock population.

More than physical scarcity of CPRs, absence of well-defined institutional framework to manage the resources is responsible for depletion of resources. The government, village community and NGO should play a crucial role in overcoming the problem of the tragedy of commons in these days

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