ABSTRACT
This chapter examines traditional and contemporary manifestations of common property, and the theories and myths that surround its application to natural resource management. It explains common property's understated strengths, the centrality of use rights, an inherent sociability, its environmental norms and values and its locally-generated resilience. The chapter explores triggered social upheaval, emigration and massive demographic change, a fundamental realignment of our conception of property. Common property in its traditional form was, and remains, intrinsically linked to an agrarian, village-based, pre-industrial conception of society. Common lands reflected the central importance of agriculture to the English economy, in particular the open-field system of agricultural practice. Carol Rose identifies modern factors for the obliviousness of limited common property, and its problematic place in western legal traditions. Common property, with the institutional regulation it implies, is capable of satisfactory performance in the management of natural resources, such as grazing and forest land, in a market economy.
