Land use, environmental change, and sustainable development: The role of institutional diagnostics

Abstract

Although the “tragedy of the commons” is common currency in popular accounts of problems arising in human-environment relations, empirical research has shown that common-property systems do not always lead to tragic outcomes. Moreover, systems of private property or public property, often proposed as solutions to the tragedy of the commons, can generate tragedies of their own that are equally severe. The challenge we face is to develop strategies for avoiding these tragedies featuring structures of property rights that are most likely to lead to sustainable outcomes in specific situations ranging from local communities reliant on the harvest of renewable resources to the global system facing the prospect of climate change. Successful governance systems typically involve regulatory, top-down strategies, normative, bottom-up strategies, or some combination of the two. What is needed to achieve sustainable results is a­ diagnostic approach that matches institutions to specific biophysical and socioeconomic conditions in contrast to an ideological approach that advocates the application of one system of property rights to all situations.