Common property and environmental governance

Property rights have been traditionally understood as a means to control the use of natural resources when these face overexploitation and pollution problems. Common property regimes grant said control to user groups (e.g., fisher, irrigator, forest communities) in the expectation that they will be able to self-regulate resource use or emissions within a particular territory. Common property theory has highlighted a number of conditions under which users can make common property regimes succeed over time. Recently, new scholarship has also made good progress in better understanding the combination of common property regime features with features of public and private property regimes. Despite the progress made, scholars have paid only limited attention to the internal and external politics of common property regimes and the possibility to understand their existence through the lenses of non-economic logics. Future research shall better integrate knowledge emerging from institutional ecological economics with power and care perspectives.