The report was produced by National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), Government of India on Common Property Resources (CPR) in rural areas of the country, as part of its 54^th Round survey conducted during January-June, 1998.

It presents a brief introduction to the perspectives and discussed on the definitions and concepts of CPR.  The enquiry aimed at providing certain basic statistics on the size of CPRs, type of benefits derived and the magnitude and proportion of households making use of CPRs.

A checklist for gender-sensitive analysis of land tenure and common property resource systems, with sections on: gender roles, needs, incentives and benefits; project planning; livelihoods context; facilitating participation; and measuring impact.

The present century has seen a significant real increase in resource conflict in semi-arid Africa. The most important causes of this are human population increase and the globalisation of the economy. Such conflicts reflect both point resources (mines, farms, reserves) and ecozonal conflicts (water, grazing and hunting rights). Although attempts to involve the community have been partially successful in relation to reserved land, conflict over extensive and patchy common property resources such as wetlands and grazing has made them more difficult to conserve and manage.

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This article disucsses the effects of the last four decades of change in China in relation to traditional Tibetan pastoral production systems.

The poor adapt and learn to live with poverty in a variety of ways. They also try to cope with shocks from events such as droughts, floods and loss of employment. Environmental resources play a vital role in their survival strategies. As the poor depend on environmental resources, one can expect them to have a stake in their preservation. Much of the damage done to natural resources is by others. Thus deforestation is much more an outcome of commercial logging for timber than fuelwood gathering by the poor.

Explores how the institutions of property rights and collective action play a particularly important role in the application of technologies for agricultural and natural resource management.Technologies with long time frames tend to require tenure security to provide sufficient incentives for adoption, while those that operate on a large spatial scale will require collective action to coordinate.

Tanzania’s well-known village establishment programme, which is called Ujamaa , allowed for the sedentarization of almost all rural residents in some 8 000 villages in the 1970s. The effective impact of villagization on land distribution may vary, but a general preference for individual assignments of rights has been observed in nearly all cases under study, which is at least partially due to the track record of communal production in the framework of Ujamaa . Only 6 percent of the country’s total surface is under cultivation.

The present land tenure situation in Uganda is essentially the result of four factors: customary tenure practices, the mailo tenure system introduced under the British colonial administration, the Land Reform Decree passed by Idi Amin’s government in 1975, and the disrupting social order under the Amin regime and during the period following its downfall. The impacts of the Land Reform Decree and civil disobedience have led to the degradation of common property resources, particularly forest areas and pastures.

The core thesis is that Western neoclassical economics and law (particularly Anglo-American) have a peculiar cultural history that biases Western-trained economists and lawyers against common property systems like those found among Africans and American Indians. This Western cultural bias is expressed through the recurrent focus on individuals as atomistic and independent of each other in contract and property law, as well as in economic theory.

This paper considers the evidence surrounding the popular view that common property management regimes (CPMRs) of forest management in Latin America must inevitably break down in the face of economic and demographic pressures. The evidence shows that there have been both positive and negative experiences, with a number of policy implications. The over-riding need is to correct for institutional and policy failures which have catalysed the erosion of CPMRs.

Brief paper on the role of property rights in the economic analysis of environmental problems in Southeast Asia. First talks about the causal role of property rights in the existence of environmental problems, then how property rights must be incorporated into the economic analyses of these problems. Finally, addresses the extent to which changes in property regimes may offer scope for solving persistent environmental problems.