Science, Environment and Development Group

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Thursday, 22 March, 2007
Property Rights for a Small Planet: Role of Common Property in a Sustainable Future
Margaret McKean, Department of Political Science and Nicholas School of Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University
Biography, Abstract, Slides

Biography:

Margaret McKean is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She specializes in Japanese politics and environmental and resource politics. She is the author of Environmental Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan (1981), and has written several chapters and articles on citizen activism, environmental policy-making, energy policy, and economic distribution in Japan. More recently she has been working on the relationship between property rights and environmental outcomes, and on the management of common-pool resources in particular, in Japan and elsewhere. She was a member of the National Academy of Science’s panel on Common Property and Environmental Management, served as President of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, and serves now on the North American Sustainable Use Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Her current research is on electoral reform in Japan, collective choice and the management of scarce resources in Japan, and on nationalization and subsequent devolution of property rights in common-pool resources around the globe.

Abstract:

We have already established that in spite of the tragedy of the commons (which is really a tragedy only of unmanaged commons), communities in many times and places have made successful use of common property arrangements to use but also to sustain environmental resources. We can mine these numerous experiments with common property arrangements to revise our understanding about the efficiency of different forms of property rights and about the factors that drive the evolution of property rights of various sorts. If we properly understand this evolutionary pressure, we can make better choices about where and when we need what kinds of property rights on an environmentally stressed planet.

Slides:

mckean_property_rights_070322.pdf (25 kb)