Between Free Riders and Free Raiders: Property Rights and Soil Degradation in Context

Abstract

This paper aims at a reorientation of the assumptions and perspectives with which the significance of property rights for more or less sustainable land use is viewed. The conventional four property categories do not offer a useful guidance into the complexity of property relationships. Generalisations over relations between categorical types of property rights and environmental consequences are dangerous and do not seem to be warranted given the empirical evidence. Rather, characteristics of property rights seem to play a dominant role for land use, relatively independent of the legal status of the land, such as the time horizon of land users, their dependence on the resource and the kind of dependence, and the spatial proximity/distance to the resource. In particular, actual constellations of property rights, in other words the distribution of wealth, over people and resources are important characteristics. Institutions should be approached from a post-institutionalist perspective which problematises the relationships between the normative-legal institutional framework, the social relationships that develop in their context and the social practices these rules purport to regulate, and which maintain or change the relationships and the normative institutional framework.