Summary of Common Property Resource Management

In Common Property Resource Management, we discussed some basic concepts such as common property regime, private property regime, state property regime, and open access or no property regime. We also discussed the problem of common property resources and the alternative techniques of management of common property resources.

The management of common property resources through two extreme types of institutions, viz., private and state does not emerge as appropriate solution where overexploitation is underway. Private property may be problematic both from equity and efficiency point of view, while the state resource management or any centralised mode of resource management suffers from serious information gaps and the problem of conflict resolution. Collective management or community-based management, on the other hand, emerges as the appropriate solution to the problem of commons basically because of two factors. One, there has been in-depth field studies pointing to the considerable collective action potential of rural communities.

Two, non-cooperative game theory has shown that cooperation is a possible outcome in such communities, especially so if they are small and interactions among group users are frequent.