Resource asymmetry and property rights in agricultural drainage systems: Implications for collective action

Pranay Ranjan,Tomas M Koontz

doi:10.18352/ijc.772

Abstract

Scholarly work on examining how property rights affect incentives for collective action in common-pool resource management has benefited immensely from the property-rights analytical scheme proposed in the seminal work of Schlager & Ostrom (1992). Here we apply this scheme to agricultural drainage systems, conceptualizing them as a common-pool resource held in a private property ownership regime and exhibiting asymmetric dilemmas. We propose a property rights analytical scheme to suit the asymmetry of incentives in drainage systems, while examining how drainage management institutions allocate bundles of property rights and how property rights interact to affect incentives for collective action. Unlike Schlager and Ostrom (1992), we find that property rights are not cumulatively bundled, and that having land held in private decouples use rights from physical access rights. In addition, the existence of complementary institutional mechanisms, one landowner-driven and the other government-driven, can provide collective action incentives.

Highlights

Introduction and rationaleNatural resource management often poses collective action dilemmas
Whereas resource asymmetry provides a starting point for conceptualizing spatial location of landowners’ private property with respect to the drainage system, we investigate in detail the institutional mechanisms for constructing and maintaining agricultural drainage systems in the Western Lake Erie Basin (WLEB) region of Ohio
We describe the institutional mechanisms for drainage improvement and how property rights are defined within each mechanism

Summary

Introduction

Introduction and rationaleNatural resource management often poses collective action dilemmas. A plethora of collective action studies have investigated patterns of property rights and institutions of collective action for irrigation systems (Fujiie et al 2005; Totin et al 2014), fisheries (Schlager 1994; Kanchanaroek et al 2013) and forests (Agrawal and Ostrom 2001; Roy et al 2012). Such institutional analysis has usually focused on common-pool resources (CPRs) which are held by the community, i.e. under a common-property regime. Property rights can help individuals to overcome such free rider problems (Ostrom 2004)

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