Governing Common Resources: Environmental Markets and Property in Water

Abstract

Environmental markets, in concert with the rise of property-based instruments to regulate natural resources, have gained ascendancy in many areas once the preserve of more traditional forms of legal regulation. Prominent among the trends has been the development of cap and trade regimes that utilize property rights as specific instruments to achieve 'efficiencies' in the regulation of common pool resources such as water, and increasingly in emerging 'resources' such as greenhouse gas emissions. Adoption of property rights is regarded as instituting a system that prevents the 'tragedy of the commons'. This chapter critically explores this view by considering the emergence of new forms of prop..