Abstract

How societies can cope with flood risk along coasts and riverbanks is a critical theoretical and empirical problem – particularly in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the increased severity of floods. An example of this challenge is the growing costs of publicly-funded flood defense in Britain and popular outcries during the regular occasions that the British government fails to protect property and land during heavy rains. Traditional approaches to institutional analysis suggest that flood management is either a public good that only the government is competent to provide or a private good to which individual landowners are ultimately responsible for supplying. We argue that an important cause of failure in flood management is mismatched property rights. This is where the scale of natural events and resources fail to align with the scale of human activities, responsibility and ownership. Moreover, the spatial dimensions of floods mean that their management is often appropriately conceptualized as a common pool resource problem. As a result, commons institutions as conceptualized and observed by Elinor Ostrom are likely to be major contributors to effective flood management. What governance process should decide the size and scope of these institutions? We argue that bottom-up responses to problems of mismatched property rights are facilitated within larger societies that are characterized by market processes. Moreover, the wider presence of price signals delivers to local communities essential knowledge about the cost of maintaining private property and the relative scarcity of the communal goods. We discuss how our theoretical positions align with experience in Britain and what the implications of our theoretical approach are for facilitating the development of better institutions.

Highlights

  • What role can commons institutions play in ameliorating mismatched property rights? Hardin (1968) asserted that the existence of commons produced a ‘tragedy’ remediable through strict division of natural resources into private property or state control

  • We show how this perspective resonates with the experience and contemporary challenges of flood management in Britain

  • Flood management is better conceived as a common pool resource problem (Ostrom 1990)

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Summary

Introduction

What role can commons institutions play in ameliorating mismatched property rights? Hardin (1968) asserted that the existence of commons produced a ‘tragedy’ remediable through strict division of natural resources into private property or state control. Ostrom (1990), and the Bloomington School of Political Economy, revealed instead a range of long-lived, productive and peaceful commons institutions that rely on neither a central state nor individual private property. The costs and long-term implications of river-dredging and other pro-active interventions remain controversial These local challenges are examples of flood management problems that are emerging globally as humanity continues to live in and develop coastal areas and river catchments, in the wake of climate change. Institutions that allow the emergence of local commons governance solutions set within a commercial society are the most promising for finding effective flood management solutions Having made these arguments, we show how this perspective resonates with the experience and contemporary challenges of flood management in Britain. In this way, we contribute to situating commons institutions into the ‘new governance’ research agenda, where various scholars have outlined how novel governance structures, often based on contracting and public-private partnerships, lead to the successful control of landscapes and natural resources We show how the emergence of better performing governance structures can be made more probable when market prices, representing needs and scarcities throughout a society, are accessible to local decision-makers

Mismatched property rights and floods
Floods as a common pool resource problem
Commons solutions
Private-property solutions to flood management
Pricing the commons
Appreciative theory
Evidence
The impact of land regulation and subsidy
Conclusion
Full Text
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