Galicia is a Spanish region which has been one of the leading producers of mussels around the world for decades. The institutional framework of the Galician floating raft culture in the mussel sector set up a scenario of institutional stability and equilibrium, in which new licenses were not granted and a winning coalition maintained the “status quo” from 1976 until 2008. Nevertheless, the two most important legal changes since the 90s took place in Galicia as of December 2008: the Fisheries Act 11/2008 and Act 6/2009 amending the former.

In this article, we reassess the role of marketing boards and similar arrangements that have played an important role in numerous agro‐food sectors of developed countries over almost a century. Referring to transaction cost economics and to more recent contributions on the allocation of decision and property rights, we interpret these arrangements as hybrid modes of governance. We hypothesize that uncertainty is the leading force pushing toward these organizational solutions and we explore forms of uncertainty at stake and their impact in shaping various types of hybrids.

The aim of this paper is to explore how collective memories of place have framed contemporary planning conflicts in a rural arena. Specifically, the paper charts the emergence of the Irish Rural Dwellers Association (IRDA) as a vocal campaigner for private property rights and a laissez-faire approach to accommodating new housing development in the open countryside.

Colonial governments asserted sovereignty and property rights gradually over the territory of Guyana, disregarding preexisting Indigenous Rights. Although a Forest Department modeled on the Indian Forest Service was established, there was no equivalent settlement process to determine the rights of forest peoples. State Forest area is declared by administrative fiat. These two elements have enabled State-endorsed forestland grabbing. Logging was scattered and selective until the early 1980s.

Land ownership in the United States is understood as a bundle of sticks representing rights to sell, lease, bequeath, mine, subdivide, develop, and so forth. The right of exclusion allows owners to prevent others from exercising a right of access. Historically, access and then exclusion contributed to a sense of self-determination and personal freedom in the American landscape. Governing agencies reserve four rights for their use: condemnation, regulation, taxation, and escheat.

Outlines major social and ecological issues involved in the coevolution of social and ecological systems by initially reviewing relevant aspects of the recent literature relating to economic development and their implications for agricultural development. Coevolutionary qualitative-type models are presented.

The objective was to evaluate the performance of the co-management of Nishorgo Support Project at Chunati Wildlife Sanctuary in Bangladesh. I adopted the Focus Groups Discussion method for opinion survey and applied the SWOT-AHP technique for data analysis. Local people did not participate in the decision-making process of forest management and they perceived co-management as a threat to their livelihoods.

We examine the efficiency, distributional, and environmental consequences of assigning spatial property rights to part of a spatially-connected natural resource, a situation which we refer to as partial enclosure of the commons. The model reflects on a large class of institutions and natural resources for which complete enclosure by a sole owner may be desirable, but is often institutionally impractical.

This themed issue of Land Use Policy builds on the papers presented at an international symposium entitled Social Dimensions of Market-based Instruments, convened by the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, in November 2010. The symposium set out to review the extent to which market-based instruments were being employed as social policy tools in various contexts, what challenges achieving relevant social policy objectives posed, what trade-offs arose between environmental, social and economic objectives, and whether and how tensions could be resolved.