An Introduction to “Overlapping Resources and Mismatched Property Rights”

Abstract

Property scholars have long explored how rights to land and resources influences their use and conservation. Over time, inquiry has turned towards the governance of competing claims. Simplistic models of rights are yielding to the social, political, and ecological realities of managing ecosystems amidst increased resource demands fueled by human population growth. Prior dichotomies between “human” and “natural” uses are dissolving. Bold new conceptions of socio-environmental models are emerging. Political scientists, ecologists, scientists, and legal scholars are working on the front lines of increasingly urgent resource conditions to update the theoretical and normative terrain of landscape governance. In 2019, the New York University School of Law Classical Liberal Institute and the Indiana University at Bloomington Ostrom Workshop Program on Natural Resource Governance invited us to co-host a conference about emerging understandings of property rights as overlapping and nested. The organizing institutions asked us to use as a starting point Contracting for Control of Landscape-Level Resources, a 2015 article co-authored by Karen Bradshaw and Dean Lueck (Bradshaw & Lueck, 2015). We hosted the conference, “Mismatched Property Rights to Landscape-Level Resources: Legal and Customary Solutions,”1 in New York over two days in March 2019. We were honored to host notable scholars, from a variety of academic disciplines and phases of their careers presenting papers, moderating panels, and acting as discussants. Billy Christmas coordinated the peer review process for this volume. This symposium volume of the International Journal of the Commons reflects the proceedings of the March 2019 conference. Like the conference, this volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of international scholars to explore new areas of the role of property in addressing socio-environmental questions, and the diverse solutions to them. As guest editors, we are grateful to the authors, peer reviewers, symposium participants, discussants, and audience who jointly created this project. The contributions of this group have transformed the initial, modest set of observations about resource governance from Contracting for Control of Landscapes into a budding new conception of property—a vision more aligned with a modern understanding of ecological and economic realities.