ABSTRACT
Introduction There are no simple and ready-made solutions for the conservation of shared natural resources. Privatisation, state control, and more recently community management have all been alternatively suggested as the best way of ensuring their conservation, but although on paper the case for any of these systems can be convincingly argued, in practice, situations are more complex, and choosing the appropriate property rights system is not in itself a guarantee that resources will be used sustainably. Extractive reserves are a case in point that both the adequacy of any property rights system and the sustainability of common resources also depend on the wider context and on how resource users interact with it.
