ABSTRACT
Property and ownership are formal expressions of the relationship between humans and the natural environment (Bromley 1991). Some economists would argue that the term property is a construct of the modern economy and that many people who live close to nature think of humans as “belonging to the land” or that the relationship is a divine one (e.g., Hanna and Jentoft 1996). In modern parlance, property consists of a bundle of rights. To properly analyze different forms of private or common property, the following typology is recommended (Ostrom and Schlager 1996) 1 :
right of access: the right to use or enjoy the property for direct utility;
right of withdrawal: the right to use the property productively for profit;
right of management: the right to set up and modify rules for the use of a property;
right of exclusion: the right to exclude some users and set rules for access to a property; and
right of alienation: the right to sell, lease, or inherit property with the rights 1–4.
Any of these rights might be partial. For example, the right to inherit user rights but not sell those rights on a market is common. Other rights may be to move, change or adapt, and even destroy or dispose of property. According to Coase, these rights should be considered “factors of production” because they determine how much useful profit an owner can earn from a property (Coase 1960). Other important aspects of ownership are legal, cultural, and psychological—for example, the psychological satisfaction of ownership (as opposed to weaker rights to compensation) as embodied in the right to refuse to sell property rights (Rachlinski and Jordan 1998).