ABSTRACT
Resources and ecosystems are increasingly being managed through private property regimes. This chapter explains this trend by unpacking the economic thinking that underpins it, and contextualizing it within a broader neoliberal turn in environmental thinking since the 1980s. Through examples of large-scale land acquisitions – also called ‘land grabbing’ – and the management of fisheries by way of tradeable fishing rights, the chapter problematizes this development, describing how it often results in a restructuring of traditional user rights, the consolidation of political and economic power, and access restrictions for local people to resources they have historically had access to.
