Recrafting Rights over Common Property Resources in Mexico

Abstract

I. Endogenous Evolution of Land Rights The propositions of Ester Boserup and the Property Rights School have dominated thinking about the endogenous evolution of land rights from open access to individual property. According to these views, there are two fundamental changes that push toward the privatization of a resource. One is its rising scarcity associated with population growth. The other is the rising value of the resource associated with greater market integration and the commercialization of agriculture. As long as there was land abundance and the resource had little commercial value, the marginal cost to current users of entry by an additional user was sufficiently small not to be worth opposing, and the magnitude of the externalities imposed in extraction by each user on all others was insignificant, making it not worth controlling. As the scarcity and value of the resource increases, changing property rights to regulate entry and to internalize the externality imposed by other users becomes profitable. Regulating entry requires transformation of the resource from open access to common property or to private property, limiting in each case access of the resource to a well-defined group of users. Internalizing externalities requires choosing between two options. One is to cooperate in the management of the common property resource (CPR) by introducing and enforcing rules that deter opportunism in the provision of services to the CPR and in the appropriation of resources from the CPR. The other is to divide the CPR among members of the community, either in subcoalitions where cooperation may prevail more easily or in individual allotments. The default option prevails when there is failure to enclose, failure to cooperate in the management of the CPR, and failure to enforce individual