The Edwards Aquifer in south-central Texas, U.S.A. is recognized worldwide for its aquatic species of flora and fauna, many of which are endangered or threatened, and also is the sole water source supporting the industrial, agricultural, municipal, and recreational needs of nearly 2 million people. Because it is generally the first species affected by low spring flows, the endangered fountain darter (Etheostoma fonticola) has been a focal point for controversies involving the endangered species act, state of Texas groundwater law, and private property rights.

Granting property rights in fisheries is assumed to provide incentives for sustainable resource exploitation. These rights might also open other income options for fishers, including some that go beyond the original objectives intended by authorities establishing the right. The opportunity for alternative uses is especially high if the details of these rights are not clearly identified.

Although the importance of science, in both desertification control and other types of environmental governance, has been emphasized by many studies, little is known about how science influences institutional changes. Based on a method combining surveys, interviews, observation, and a meta-analysis of the literature, this study explored the roles of science in institutional changes associated with desertification control in northern China.

Transferable offsets are a means of mitigating the adverse environmental impacts of resource developments. Based on insights from institutional economics, there are three elements that need to be in place for offsets to be effective: (1) property rights over the mitigating good can be defined and assigned; (2) a difference exists between the marginal cost of supplying the mitigating good and the community's marginal value for it; and (3) the transaction costs of exchanging the mitigating good are less than the trade benefit.

I argue in this paper that transaction cost is central to the analytics of climate adaptation in the local commons. I illustrate this by bringing together insights from Coase on tradability of property rights, Ostrom on institutional design principles for long lived commons and Williamson on transaction cost and governance mechanisms. I call this the COW model on the analytics of climate adaptation, which I illustrate using grounded theory in the case of the 400-year old zangjera irrigation societies in Northern Philippines.

Land consolidation (LC) can be described as the rearrangement of land areas according to developing agricultural technology. Land reallocation is the most important phase of LC. The reallocation process is a legal obligation in Turkey which takes into account landowners’ preferences. First, the planner determines these preferences at interview. These interviews should be performed very carefully, because they are a tool for rearranging property rights. In this study, preferences for reallocation process were determined with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).

There are many different images of the livestock industry and many persons are unhappy with the outcome of the market process. Instead of explaining why the market leads to the current outcomes, it is wise to be prepared that politics will rearrange the property rights in order to produce different outcomes of the market mechanism. In this essay, I show that there are market processes that contribute to a more sustainable way of farming, and that these processes can be reinforced. There are also unsustainable public policies that can be liberalized.

The long-term solution to managing the impacts of sea-level rise is through the development and application of planning provisions and public policy, especially with regards to new developments in the coastal zone. By contrast, imposing new planning provisions, such as enforced retreat strategies, on legacy or existing private assets that are exposed to erosion and sea-level rise will impact on private property rights. In many cases this will incentivise rights-holders to pursue alternative recourse pathways.

The South African government has endeavoured to strengthen property rights in communal areas and develop civil society institutions for community-led development and natural resource management. However, the effectiveness of this remains unclear as the emergence and operation of civil society institutions in these areas is potentially constrained by the persistence of traditional authorities. Focusing on the former Transkei region of Eastern Cape Province, three case study communities are used examine the extent to which local institutions overlap in issues of land access and control.

Market-based instruments (MBIs) are promoted as economically efficient, targeted solutions to otherwise intractable environmental policy problems with additional potential to improve the livelihood security of ecosystem service providers.

Forest is an important natural resource to the Latvian economy. It is useful to examine the historical context to estimate objectively the events that created the structure of forest property rights today. While 50.3% of all Latvian forests are state-owned and the remaining 49.7% are under different ownership, historically this structure has changed with the political situation and the authorities.

Conservation easements (or conservation covenants) are commonly conceptualized as acquisitions of sticks in a ‘bundle of rights’ and are increasingly implemented for wildlife conservation on private lands. This research asks: (1) What are the possibilities and limitations of the conservation easement approach to wildlife conservation in contrasting rural and periurban regions? and (2) How does analysis of conservation easements differ when examining property as a bundle of rights or alternative metaphors?