Re-Crafting Rights over Common Property Resources in Mexico

Agrarian Attorney General), and the World Bank for financial and/or logistical support with data collection. We are obliged to the representatives and members of agrarian communities for their participation in the surveys and case studies. 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 (CPR) or to private property, limiting in each case access to the resource to a well defined group of users (Ostrom, 2001). Internalizing externalities requires choosing between two options. One is to cooperate in the management of the 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 (McCarthy et al., 2001; Otsuka and Place, 2001). The other is to divide the CPR among members of the community, either in sub-coalitions where cooperation may prevail more easily, or in individual allotments (Baland and Platteau, 1996). The default option prevails when there is failure to enclose, failure to cooperate in the management of the CPR, and failure to enforce individual property rights after division. In this case, incentives to manage the resource for sustained use are missing, and there is both under-provision of services for maintenance and over-extraction from the resource, leading to degradation and depletion, the well known " tragedy of the commons " (Hardin, 1974). Recent contributors to the New Institutional Economics of property rights have attempted to identify conditions under which the CPR option was eventually chosen over the division option (Wade 1987; Ostrom, 1992b; Baland and Platteau, 1996). There are …