As discussed earlier, common-pool resources have two important characteristics: subtractability and non-excludability. For such resources, a mismatch between the benefits and the costs of consuming the commons can occur: resource users capture the full benefits and share the costs with others.1 Common-pool resources such as forests or the oceans are so-called open-access resources in the sense that in the absence of any legal rule or social norm anyone could in theory take for example the fish in the ocean or cut the trees in a forest.2 Multiple resource users may compete with each other to harvest the resources disregarding their ecological limits. There is therefore a great likelihood that overharvesting or overfishing will take place leading to forest depletion3 or to an extinction of species.4 This phenomenon that an open-access resource will in the end lead to a depletion of resources has been described in the seminal paper by Garrett Hardin as ‘the tragedy of the commons’.5 It results from the fact that no one is excluded from the use of the particular resource. Private ownership is de facto simply established by the person who takes first access, for example of the fish in the ocean or the tree in the forest. This first mover advantage consequently leads to a situation where competing users will have an incentive to engage in a race whereby all try to harvest as much as possible as quickly as possible from the resource in order to avoid others doing so. Without rules aiming at the regulation of the common-pool resources extinction may be the result. The goal of the creation of property rights is to provide exclusive control and hence to internalize the externalities that follow from open access. Various property rights can be used to internalize the externalities,6 including public, private and communal property rights.7
These different types of property rights are often related to different institutions: the state, the market and self-governing communities.8 Traditional literature regards external interventions as necessary to help resource users to get out of the trap of collective action by resorting to either the state or the market.9 The first approach is often associated with claiming state ownership over resources and relying on state regulation to decide on how to harvest and manage resources. The second approach is to establish private property rights over common-pool resources and hence to mimic the market.10 In addition to these two institutions, later literature indicates that sometimes user groups manage to get themselves out of the collective action trap via self-governing communities.11 In this case, property rights are vested in a group of resource users rather than in individuals.
These property rights and institutions are not established without costs. Property rights need to be defined; properties need to be policed and when disputes arise, dispute settlement mechanisms are necessary. These various activities associated with the establishment and maintenance of property rights create transaction costs.12 Therefore, it is not always desirable to establish property rights for common-pool resources. If the resource is uncongested and the transaction costs for establishing property rights are high, it is desirable to leave the resource in open access.13 When congestion increases as time passes, or technological innovations reduce transaction costs, such as boundary maintenance costs, establishing property rights becomes more desirable. This also implies, the best ways to balance environmental protection and minimalize transaction costs are not fixed but dynamic and evolving.
Transaction cost is a concept that is often vaguely defined or only illustrated with examples.14 The property rights literature usually uses it in a broad sense to incorporate ‘costs associated with the transfer, capture and protection of rights’15 or ‘the resources used to establish and maintain property rights’.16 Cole differentiates transaction costs into two types: exclusion costs and coordination costs. ‘Exclusion costs are the costs of drawing and enforcing boundaries to restrict access to and use of the resource to the owner(s) of the property’.17 Coordination costs are the costs associated with solving collective action problems.18 To reduce exclusion costs hence requires a clear definition of property rights and the capacity to enforce the rights, including policing, dispute settlement and sanctioning. For private property, decision-making power is vested in individuals. Sometimes, however, the individual owners need to negotiate with external parties in using and managing resources. Multiple individual fishery quota holders using the same fishery are such an example. For both communal and public property, collective decision-making institutions are established and coordination takes place inside these institutions. These three types of transaction costs (definition, enforcement and coordination) are connected to two other factors: information and scale. Collecting and distributing information is crucial in both exclusion and coordination activities. Scale concerns the level to which property rights are managed and possibly the links between the units that may manage property rights at different levels. The scale of governance can influence how property rights are enforced and also how rights holders coordinate with other stakeholders. These five factors set the necessary preconditions for property rights to be able to effectively address common-pool resources problems: clear definition of property rights, enforcement, coordination, information creation and sharing, and scaling. In fact, these elements which are referred to in the literature as transaction costs will be used in this study as the preconditions that need to be fulfilled for the proper functioning of property rights. Proper functioning, or effectiveness, is used in a broad sense in this study. It can either refer to compliance, actions that aim to reduce common-pool resources problems or the actual reduction of common-pool resources problems. The five preconditions will be the crucial elements to be used in our case studies to analyse the way in which public and private regulation affect the functioning of property rights.
Those preconditions are determined by diverse factors, including the nature of the resources, ecological, technological and institutional circumstances, and even culture and ideology.19 This research focuses on the influence of institutional factors on the preconditions for a proper functioning of property rights, more particularly on public and private regulation. In other words, this research will examine to what extent public and private regulation interact in facilitating the necessary preconditions for effectively addressing common-pool resources problems by clearly defining property rights, enhancing enforcement capacity, smoothing coordination, generating and sharing information and operating the right scale of governance.
The establishment of property rights may contribute to solving common-pool resources problems. However, all types of property rights have their limitations in internalizing externalities. Public and private regulation can aim to overcome these limitations. The following section discusses the preconditions for a proper functioning of property rights and the limitations of each type of property rights respectively.
To establish private property rights and to mimic the market is one approach to governing common-pool resources. Private property ‘typically denotes property owned by individuals holding rights to use (in socially acceptable, i.e., non-nuisance-causing ways), dispose of, and exclude others from resources’.20 With the clear definition of the resource boundaries and its right holders, private property rights attempt to align the cost benefit analysis of the resource users with that of society, hence to overcome the externalities caused by individual decision-making.21 Individual property rights determine which individuals can decide how to access, harvest and manage the resources. They also establish who can patrol their resources, negotiate and settle disputes with outsiders and the way for individuals to resort to justice if private settlement fails. Private enforcement can create costs for both the rights holders and the public (via the court system).
Although individuals have some decision-making power concerning their resources, activities of externals also influence the status of the resource. For example, a fishery is often exploited by multiple individual quota holders. Although each fisherman has his own (quasi) property rights, the interaction of individuals influences the health of the overall fish stocks. The protection of one piece of privately owned land may also be influenced by a public road, or visitor services nearby.22 In such cases, substantial coordination costs exist if the individuals involved want to protect their resources.
To enforce their rights and to coordinate with external parties, individual rights holders need to possess sufficient information. On the one hand, the rights holders may be close to the resources and hence have intimate knowledge about the resources they are using. On the other hand, individuals may have limited capacity in producing and processing information about the bigger picture.
Private property rights can be established on both large and small-scale resources. Establishing private property rights on small-scale resources may run the risk of fragmenting larger resources and misaligning the cost benefit analyses of private actors. Larger scale resources may, on the other hand, create challenges in terms of coordination costs.23
The creation of private property rights can hence be an important tool to remedy the risk of depletion which would occur in an open-access regime. However, even if private property rights have been clearly established, market failures may still occur. For example, although private property rights are created for common-pool resources to internalize externalities, not all benefits and costs of the resource are automatically internalized. The protection of forests provides such a case in point. When private property rights have been established over forests and only the market value of the timber is internalized, other non-market values, such as the ecological and aesthetic value of the forest, are not considered by the self-interested private actors. In other words, a private actor may still use his private property in a way which creates externalities for third parties. This results in market failure which may therefore justify external intervention, including both public and private regulation.
Public property rights may also be chosen to solve common-pool resources problems. Though theoretically public property is owned by all citizens, it is usually the state that exercises the rights on their behalf. The state decides how resources are accessed, harvested and managed. The decisions that the state makes concerning the protection of resources usually take place via public regulation, such as prohibiting the commercial use of forests without permits, requiring the establishment of riparian buffer zones, mandating biodiversity protection during forest harvest and management. ‘Such state regulations may be characterized as exercises in sovereignty (imperium) rather than ownership (dominium). But this makes little practical difference. Whether the state is purporting to act as sovereign or owner, the rights it asserts are in the nature of property’.24
The enforcement of public property rights relies on public agencies. For example, the competent authority needs to decide on daily operational rules to manage their resources, to patrol the public forests or fisheries to exclude poachers and to issue sanctions in cases of non-compliance. Such enforcement may cause substantial costs and create challenges for many countries with limited governmental capacity but large areas of public resources to protect.
Designating the state as the owner and regulator of public property does not imply that the state is a unitary body. Resource management is usually an outcome of collective decision-making. Unlike private property, public property can keep the costs of negotiating and coordinating with external agents low. However, internal coordination costs can be high, including the costs of public administration and collective bargaining and decision-making.25
Again, enforcement and exclusion are not possible without information. On the one hand, compared to private property, the state can generate a high economy of scale in generating and spreading information. On the other hand, however, centralized information gathering can also be costly because of the large distance between daily management and central decision-makers. Therefore, whether public or private property is preferable in terms of information costs is an empirical question, depending on the balance between the advantages and disadvantages of both options in specific situations.
Public property rights can also be established over resources with various economies of scale. Economic analysis has especially propagated the advantages of public property rights over large-scale resources, such as protecting larger species in larger habitats, due to lower coordination costs compared to private property rights.26
Resorting to public property rights assumes that the state will manage the resources and regulate behaviour on behalf of the public interest.27 However, the actual decision-makers and enforcers are politicians and bureaucrats. ‘Like private owners, the politicians and bureaucrats who are de facto owners of de jure “public” property presumably manage resources so as to maximize their self-interests’.28 Politicians face re-election in a cycle of several years. They seldom have the long-term view to go beyond their term of office. Therefore, they may consider the short-term market value of the natural resources but not the long-term benefits from resources conservation.29 Bureaucrats, although they do not face re-election, may ‘maximize budget allocations and administrative turf’ rather than maximizing social welfare.30 In addition, although public officials may want to serve the public interest, they do not invest in the resources personally and hence do not bear the full costs of their management.31 Therefore, the cost benefit calculation of politicians and bureaucrats may not coincide with that of the general public. Moreover, the politicians and bureaucrats may be influenced by lobby groups. Often, business is well-organized and exerts more influence than countervailing interest groups such as NGOs or the public.32 In summary, like market failures which may prevent private property rights from executing their full potential to achieve environmental goals, public property rights may also suffer governmental failures. In order to overcome these limitations, public and private regulation may be warranted.
The adoption of private property rights and public property rights assumes that resource users cannot get out of the collective action dilemma themselves and that external interventions are required, either via the market or the state. Literature, however, has identified a third approach, where property rights are vested in a group of resource users rather than in individuals or the state. The group of resource users can be self-organized to set up resource use rules as well as to monitor and to enforce the rules themselves.33 After examining the characteristics of many successful self-governing institutions, Ostrom summarizes eight design principles.34 These principles are in line with the above-mentioned preconditions of property rights’ effectiveness.
The first two principles discussed by Ostrom concern the definition of property rights. They require establishing clear boundaries of resources and users, and suitable appropriation and provision rules, which define the content of the property rights. Principle three, the collective-choice arrangement, influences the coordination costs of the communal property. The communal property rights are imposed on a group of resource users and the decisions regarding resource use and management are usually made via self-governing institutions. Providing broad participation rights to resource users in the community is crucial to reduce coordination costs. Otherwise, the marginalized actors may have no incentives to comply with the rules. Principles four to six concern the enforcement of property rights. Enforcement relies on the self-governing community and the resource users themselves. The users are close to the resources and can monitor the resources’ status and each other’s performances. In case of violation, communities can impose graduated sanctions in proportion to the extent of the violation. Local conflict-settlement mechanisms can also provide cheap and low threshold solutions for the resource users to solve their disputes. The last two principles are linked to the institutional embedding of communal property rights: these rights need to be recognized under domestic law and a larger social-ecological system needs to support the usually small-scale communal property system.
As with the two other types of property rights, collecting and sharing information and scaling the management of community property rights are also important. Under communal property rights, resource users can participate in the decision-making, enforcement of and benefiting from the resource use. This creates incentives for them to collect and share information related to the status and management of the resource.35
Literature has shown that communal property rights are most suitable for managing resources on a small scale. To scale up small governance regimes several institutional adjustments need to be made. ‘It is not just a matter of nesting local arrangements within a supportive institutional context at the national and international levels. Equally important is nesting political institutions within supportive and complementary institutions from other sectors’.36
In comparison to individual property rights, the rights granted to a community can be more comprehensive. Communal property rights are often meant to safeguard a traditional lifestyle of a particular community in a geographically defined area rather than to allocate a particular resource to a community. For example, when fishing rights are vested in individuals, usually multiple individuals hold the rights to fish for specific species in the same fishery. One type of fishing rights commonly used is individual quotas for a certain species. Such a scheme creates incentives for fishermen to protect the targeted fish stocks but does not provide incentives to protect by-catch.37 When one type of communal property rights, namely territorial user rights, is established, the rights to fish for resources in specific areas is granted to a group of resource users. In this situation, the externality concerning by-catch can be internalized, since the value of by-catch becomes internal to the users’ group.38 However, some externalities may still not be internalized. For example, the influence of fishing activities on the biodiversity and benthic habitats may still be beyond the consideration of self-interested user groups.
Different from a public property rights regime, the decision-makers under communal property rights are resource users themselves, rather than politicians and bureaucrats. Hence, on the one hand, they can have more intimate knowledge of the resources and their users’ behaviour and they bear the costs and benefits of resource use directly. As such, the users of communal property may have better incentives to protect common-pool resources. On the other hand, local elites may have more influence on the self-governing institutions than other resource users. Such elites may act like politicians and bureaucrats, trying to maximize their own interests rather than the welfare of the whole resource user group.39
The trichotomy of property rights and accompanying institutional arrangements – market, state, community – is a simplification of a complicated practice. Property concerns the right to exclude all others from an asset. Ostrom distinguishes five components: the rights of access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation.40 These different elements can be granted to the same actor or different ones, leading to different types of property rights. Although the differentiation of public, private and communal property rights is a useful heuristic, it cannot accommodate hybrid forms of property rights. Taking into consideration that ownership and less complete types of property rights can be established separately on the same resource, some overlap may exist between the different categories. For example, many countries claim state ownership over forests but allow private actors to harvest and manage a certain unit of the forests via permits or concessions. Such property rights possess mixed characteristics of public and private property rights. As Cole argues, ‘Most property regimes governing environmental goods are admixtures of individual private ownership, private (non-state) common property management, state ownership and management (i.e., regulation)’.41
Similarly, a firm distinction between the three types of institutional arrangements does not exist. Though private property and communal property are usually linked with the institutional arrangements of the market and the community, public regulation also plays a role in these two types of property rights. Public regulation can alter the ‘actual or presumed property rights among independent agents’.42 For example, public regulation can confirm private ownership of forests via registration or (quasi-)private property rights over state-owned forests via concessions. The existence of traditional community rights over forests requires domestic law to recognize traditional rights and not to jeopardize traditional self-governing institutions. The existence of a competitive market for private property also needs the support of public regulation.43
The above analysis implies that the trichotomy of institutional arrangements cannot accommodate all varieties of property rights adopted in practice and the actual property rights are often mixtures of the different institutions. However, no matter which categories the actual property rights fall into, in order for them to be effective the necessary preconditions need to be fulfilled and potential market or governmental failures need to be overcome. Clear definitions, sufficient enforcement capacity and coordination, collection and distribution of information and establishing the right scale of governance are also necessary preconditions for hybrid property rights’ effectiveness.
Our rudimentary model concerning the design of property rights does not suggest that a best solution to overcome common-pool resources problems can always be established. The above discussion shows that the choice of property rights involves a comparison of the various transaction costs between different alternatives. However, an accurate estimation of the various elements of transaction costs is extremely difficult, especially ex ante.44 These elements are dynamic and vary with economic, ecological, technological and institutional settings.45 For example, technological innovations can reduce exclusion costs, or, conversely, can increase overexploitation when technological innovations render common-pool resources more accessible. Such complexities may challenge the validity of theory-based solutions. Moreover, even if effective solutions can be established, property rights and their corresponding institutions are socially embedded. Although findings may suggest that alternative property rights and institutions are more effective than current ones, making changes may be costly. The benefits of shifting to more effective property rights and institutions therefore need to be balanced with the costs incurred by institutional changes.46 The above-mentioned complexity, however, does not make a comparative analysis useless. It simply means one has to be cautious in drawing conclusions and formulating policy implications.
As discussed earlier public and private regulation can influence the preconditions of property rights’ effectiveness. The de jure property rights need to be recognized by law and the state can also formalize, invalidate or weaken the de facto property rights. The prevalence of private regulation can also influence the transaction costs of different property rights. Moreover, public and private regulation have the potential to address the limitations of different property rights. For example, the existence of market failures can result in external interventions, including both public and private regulation. Governmental failures may prevent public property rights from achieving an optimal outcome. In this situation, private regulation may complement or substitute public regulation. Before exploring the influence of public and private regulation on property rights and their limitations in addressing common-pool resources problems, it is worth noting that public regulation and private certification often interact, rather than operate separately. Therefore, before discussing the joint effect of public and private regulation on property rights of common-pool resources, this research first examines how public regulation may interact with private regulation.
Traditionally, the state plays a central role in social control. Through regulatory instruments such as zoning and spatial planning the state will decide which activities are allowed in specific areas. These instruments often constitute the basis for the exercise of property rights and are hence strongly linked with property rights. Those decisions are largely taken via public regulation. However, the emerging private regulation transfers ‘power and authority from state to international and local level’ and ‘from public to private’.47 The new forms of regulation, rather than acting as an alternative to public regulation and as ‘the hollowing out of the state’,48 are increasingly recognized as closely linked with public regulation.49
The literature on institutions and environmental governance regimes has tried to categorize the types of interaction. According to interaction effects, Eberlein et al. categorize the relationship between public and private regulation as competition, coordination, cooptation and chaos.50 In this research, the interaction between public and private regulation is examined with the goal of understanding their joint effect on various property rights.
Public and private regulation is often analysed in terms of the architecture of the regulatory regimes and the actors involved. Less attention, however, has been paid to the instruments used under different regulatory regimes. The literature on environmental instrument mixes is still piecemeal and mainly theoretical. However, instruments are an important component of rules and hence of institutions or regimes. They provide the linkage between the policy-makers and the targeted group, showing how policy-maker can influence the behaviour of the targeted group and further, to achieve the environmental goals. Public and private regulation is not possible ‘without the use of a diverse set of policy instruments’.51 Breaking down public and private regulation into specific instruments helps to understand how they interact, and further how such interaction influences property rights.52 Therefore, this research focuses on instrument interaction. Instruments can either be relevant for the establishment of property rights (e.g. forest concessions) or aim at solving the limitations of property rights (e.g. performance standards for fishermen to protect benthic habitats). In case other interactions influence property rights, they will be incorporated as well. For example, governmental authorities and certifying bodies can coordinate their activities, share information, and reduce redundancies in auditing.
As discussed earlier, public and private regulation can have two important functions in relation to the different property rights.
First, public and private regulation can influence the preconditions of property rights’ proper functioning. Hence we will address the question whether or not public and private regulation contribute to a clear definition of property rights, enhance enforcement capacity, promote coordination, induce the collection and distribution of information and address the right scale of governance. Second, public and private regulation can address the limitations of various property rights. For example, both public and private regulation can intervene in terms of market failures by commanding self-interested private actors to protect biodiversity and to establish riparian buffer zones. When governmental failures are present, private certification may also provide a complement or substitute for public regulation.
However, to a large extent the ability of a governance regime to remedy these externalities will also depend upon what can generally be referred to as ‘good governance’. The importance of good governance in sustainable development has been largely stressed in the literature.53 It is more particularly the importance of institutions that guarantee good governance that has been stressed.54 The good governance concept has broadly been used also as a ‘meta-concept’ within the framework of globalizing administrative law in order to benchmark the effectiveness of particular institutions in (developing) countries.55 Importantly for this topic is that one aspect of good governance is precisely the presence of well-defined property rights.56 Therefore, the interaction between public and private regulation in relation to particular property rights can, within the context of a specific legal system, not be studied in isolation but will have to be related to particular criteria of good governance.
We will provide indications of good governance in the countries we have selected for case studies. Some general information with respect to the annual GDP of the country as well as a few quantitative indicators measuring the governance will also be provided. The World Bank has the worldwide governance indicators (WGI) project which has specific indicators of good governance. Countries have been ranked according to that WGI. For every country we discuss we will mention its scoring on the WGIs. Both in the WGI and Transparency International, an index on corruption is provided. The scoring on corruption will also be mentioned for every country. We do realize that these are just quantitative indicators which obviously have their limits. However, we believe that these already provide some context and background and some rough indication of the governance system in the particular country.
It is important to stress that the three crucial elements for our case studies (property rights, interaction between public and private governance and good governance) cannot be seen in isolation. It is precisely for that reason that in the case studies this is addressed as an indication of good governance on the basis of established criteria. That will better allow a holistic approach whereby the relationship between the three central elements of our study can be analysed.
We have chosen case studies as our methodology in order to be able to accommodate the influences of different national contexts. A logical consequence of this choice, as far as the public regulatory system is concerned, is that this research will focus on domestic law. International law is only briefly sketched for the understanding of emerging private regimes (due to the lack of international law or because of the need to complement international law).
To understand how the interaction between public and private regulation as well as their influence on property rights play out in practice, nine countries have purposely been selected for case studies. The criteria for choosing these countries include: the prominence of the targeted environmental problem, the stages of development, the types of property rights adopted in these countries as well as the existence of comparatively well, institutionalized private regulatory regimes. This led us to the selection of some countries where private property played an important role (such as in the US) whereas in other countries public property was more prominent (for example in Canada). By also choosing some countries from the developing world (Indonesia and Bolivia) we could see how particularly in those countries the interaction between public and private regulation with the property rights regimes worked differently from that in developed countries like the US, Canada and Sweden. Moreover, by selecting both developed and developing countries which equally score differently as far as good governance indicators are concerned, we also had a broad sample of differing countries, thus allowing us to obtain some indication concerning the importance of good governance in relation to the establishment of property rights and the interaction with public and private regulation. The selection of the countries was hence determined by the relevant questions identified in the theoretical framework.
For each country study, the main forest or fishery problems are briefly introduced, followed by an overview of indicators for good governance and an introduction of the property rights and governance systems addressing such problems. Then the interaction between public and private regulation (as well as the instruments used in them) is examined. Individual case studies also examine whether in practice public and private regulation for forest and fishery interact in a way to fulfil the necessary preconditions for the proper functioning of property rights and to overcome their limitations in addressing common-pool resources problems. After individual case studies, the similarities and differences of the interacted systems across countries will be analysed through comparison.
The analysis may equally provide some indications on particular strengths and weaknesses in the property rights regimes in particular countries, more particularly in relation to the interaction with public and private regulation. This may allow for some recommendations. However, a warning is in place in that respect. Our case study approach does not claim any causal relationship between the structure of property rights, the interaction of public and private regulation and the level of common-pool resources problems. Our case study methodology does not allow the determination of such causal effects, though we will describe the interplay between different factors in national contexts. Moreover, in particular cases we may conclude that it is not the interaction between public and private regulation and the specific property rights per se that affect the effectiveness of addressing common-pool resources problems, but rather a lack of good governance. Given the importance of good governance we do provide indicators of it in the specific case studies, but a full analysis of the quality of governance in particular countries is clearly beyond the scope of our study. For the same reason we cannot engage in recommendations with respect to the improvement of good governance in particular countries.
1 Hardin 1968; Alexander & Peñalver 2012.
2 Cooter & Ulen 2008, p. 154.
3 Ibid.
4 Faure & Skogh 2003, p. 40.
5 Hardin 1968.
6 Demsetz 1967, p. 347.
7 Feeny et al. 1990, p. 1.
8 Ostrom 1990; Ostrom 2010; Imperial & Yandle 2005, pp. 493–509.
9 The famous public choice scholar, James Buchanan, referred to the state as a leviathan. See Buchanan 1975.
10 Ostrom 1990, pp. 8–13.
11 Ibid., pp.13–21.
12 Allen 2000, pp. 898–899; Allen 1991, pp. 1–18.
13 Cooter & Ulen 2010, p. 148.
14 Allen 2000, pp. 898–899. For such examples, see Barzel 1985, p. 8; Alchian & Woodward 1988, p. 66.
15 Barzel 1989, p. 122.
16 Allen 1991.
17 Cole 2002, p. 131.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 135.
20 Cole 2010, p. 229.
21 Demsetz 1967, pp. 348–349.
22 Cole 2002, p. 147.
23 Cole 2002, pp. 150–151.
24 Cole 2010, p. 236.
25 Cooter & Ulen 2010, p. 104.
26 Lueck 1989, p. 291.
27 Prakash & Potoski 2007.
28 Cole 2010, p. 252; see also Anderson & Leal 1991; Stroup & Baden 1983.
29 Cole 2010, p. 253; Stroup & Baden 1983; Stroup & Goodman 1992.
30 Cole 2010, p. 253; Stroup & Baden 1983; Orzechowski 1977.
31 Anderson & Leal 1991.
32 Buchanan & Tollison 1984; Mueller 2004; Olson 1973; Olson 1986; Revesz 2001.
33 Ostrom 1990, 2010.
34 Ostrom 2010, p. 422.
35 Wilen, Cancino & Uchida 2012.
36 McGinnis & Ostrom 2008, pp. 189–211.
37 Wilen, Cancino & Uchida 2012.
38 Ibid.
39 For example, research on community-managed forests in Indonesia shows that local elites have manipulated the decision-making process and have failed to reach a desirable outcome for the whole group. See Urano 2014.
40 Schlager & Ostrom 1992; Cole 2010, p. 231; see also Honoré 1961, pp. 107–147.
41 Cole 2010, p. 235.
42 Bromley 1991.
43 Ostrom 1990, p. 15.
44 Cole 2002, p. 136.
45 Ibid., p. 135.
46 Ostrom 1990, Chapter 4.
47 Scott, Cafaggi & Senden 2011, p. 4.
48 Jessop 1994; Peters 1994, p. 739; Rhodes 2005, p. 138.
49 Bartley 2011, p. 517; Cafaggi & Renda 2012; Scott, Cafaggi & Senden 2011.
50 Eberlein et al. 2014, pp. 11–12.
51 Zehavi 2012, p. 242.
52 For example, to understand whether private forest certification schemes complement, replace or contradict public regulation in a specific jurisdiction, one needs to first analyse the various instruments used under the domestic public regulation and certification schemes, such as forest tenure rights, zoning plan, biodiversity standards, logging permits and quota and so on.
53 See, for example, Jordan 2008.
54 Chandra & Tisdell 1998 and Griendle 2007.
55 See more particularly Esty 2006 and Nanda 2006.
56 Prasad 2003.