Environmental Impacts of Property Rights Regimes: A Systematic Review

Presenter: Baruani Mshale B.Mshale@cgiar.org

Authors: Ojanen, M. et al.

Presentation OutlineMotivation and rationale for the systematic review

Approach and methods

Preliminary analysis and results

Next steps

Motivation and RationaleExisting literature has shown that:

• The combination of several factors have led to the transfer and sharing of many resource-related rights to both community and private actors

• Extent of natural resources managed under community and private property rights arrangements has significantly expanded and further expansion is under way in many tropical developing countries

• Common, government and private property rights regimes are each capable of yielding sustainable environmental outcomes

Motivation and RationaleExisting reviews of literature have: • Covered community property rights regimes or co-management regimes

or decentralization aspects (e.g. Pagdee, Kim, and Daugherty 2006, Evans, Cherrett, and Pemsl 2011).

• Assessed regime performance in relation to protected areas: comparisons

between state protected, community protected and open access areas (Shahabuddin and Rao 2010, Porter-Bolland et al. 2012).

Our SR improves on existing reviews in three distinct ways: • Covers three different property rights regimes: community, public and

private

• Covers three natural resource systems: fisheries, forests and rangelands

• Covers three world regions: Africa, Asia and Latin America

Three broad questions

1) What are the environmental impacts of different property rights regimes in forests, fisheries, and rangelands? Expanding on existing reviews that have focused mainly on forests

2) Which property rights regimes are associated with positive, negative or neutral environmental outcomes?

3) How do those environmental outcomes compare within and across resource systems and world regions? Analysis of contextual factors.

Answers to these questions remain elusive because the substantial body of relevant evidence has not been systematically analyzed.

Uses PICO framework (CEE, 2013)

Population Intervention Comparator Outcomes

Forests, fisheries and rangelands

State property,

private property,

community property,

and mixed regimes

Before and after intervention (temporal dimension) With and without the intervention, from a similar setting (spatial dimension) Both before and after AND with and without intervention (BACI)

Forests: Forest cover, species diversity and abundance, biomass, perceptions of forest condition, deforested area, land conversion, measures of disturbances such as number of cut stumps Fisheries: Abundance of fish and invertebrates, size and diversity of species, biomass, coral cover, etc. Rangelands: Species diversity and abundance, plant and bare ground cover, proportion of different species, soil indicators, biomass, number of supported animals etc.

Approach: Review TeamA multi-disciplinary review team:• Esther Mwangi• Daniel Miller• Baruani Mshale• Maria Ojanen• Wen Zhou• Gilian Petrokofsky• Sue Helen Nieto• Louis Durey

A team of advisors comprised several experts in property rights regimes and natural resources management

Methods: Searches

The search was conducted in 90 online databases, including• databases for academic literature (Web of Knowledge, CAB

Abstracts, Agris, Agricola, Scopus, Scielo), • general web search engines (Google and Google Scholar), • library collections (Digital library of the commons) • as well as publication websites of various research institutions,

international organizations and universities (FAO, World Bank, CGIAR research centers, USAID).

• We also searched grey literature in NGO and other think-tank websites (WWF, Conservation International, RRI).

Methods: Search Terms• Population terms: Forest, fish, marine, grassland, pastoralist,

pasture, rangeland

• Intervention terms: Collective, common, community, customary, government, public, private, small-scale, state, public, private, company, concession, participatory, collaborative, co-operative, co-manage, shared, joint

• Intervention-related terms: Decentralization, tenure, reform, allocation, ownership, property right, property rights, property regime, property system, management, access, harvest, open access

Methods: Inclusion CriteriaType of study: primary empirical literature using one of the three designs (temporal, spatial, BACI), such as case studies, case–control studies and cohort studies, including quantitative and qualitative research.

Subjects covered: studies that assessed any property regime associated with forests, fisheries and rangelands. Excluded papers on environmental outcomes with no reference to property regime and studies focusing only on plantation forests, agro-forestry and aquaculture.

Regional focus: developing countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia and the Pacific given some similarities in emergence and expansion of tenure regimes over the past 3 decades

Timeframe: included studies published from 1990-present.

Methods: Three Steps Assessment

Title, Abstract and Full-text screening • using quality assessment criteria developed by the team, based on

recommendations by the Cochrane Collaboration (Higgins and Green 2008) as well as previous reviews (Brooks, Waylen, and Borgerhoff Mulder 2013).

• addressed the clarity and replicability of methods, appropriateness of methods, study design, sample size and confounding factors of selected studies.

Screening results: 1990 to first half of 2014• Initial hits identified: 32 648 hits. • After removing duplicates: 29 119 titles.• After title and abstract screening: 1497 articles• After full-text screening: 208 were included• This presentation uses data from 107 that included information on the

bundle of rights

Methods: Unpacking the bundle of rights

Access is the right to enter a defined resource area

Withdrawal is the right to enter a defined resource area and obtain resource units or products of a resource system (e.g., cutting firewood or timber, harvesting fish, grazing cattle)

Management is the right to regulate internal use patterns and transform the resource by making improvements (e.g., planting seedlings, thinning trees)

Exclusion is the right to determine who will have right of withdrawal and how that right may be transferred

Alienation is the right to sell or lease withdrawal, management, and exclusion rights.

Right to income is the right to benefit from a resource even without using it directly and is derived from permitting others to use the resource (Eggertsson 1990, Honore 1961).

Methods: Data Extraction

Case study identification and research methods

Author; Year of publication; Title of the publication; Research question; Study discipline (natural sciences, social sciences or mixed); Study year; Data collection methods used; Location (subnational, country and world region as classified by UnStats)

Regime characteristics

Nature of the regime -de jure and de facto: state, community, private or mixed. Mixed was considered to be any combination of the main three property regimes; Stated objectives of the property rights regime intervention; Regime intervention year

Environmental outcomes

Environmental measurements and indicators used in the study; Study results on biological outcomes ; Study conclusions on biological outcomes; Review team assessment on the environmental outcomes: evaluations were made based on the study design (temporal, spatial, both)

Contextual factors Environmental context; political context; socio-economic context

Additional information

Clarity of rights; stability of rights; level of enforcement; legitimacy of decision making authority over rights; external support; gender equality of rights

Data Analysis: Figure 1. Distribution of articles by (a) resource system and

(b) geographical region

53; 50%

40; 37%

14; 13%

forestsfisheriesrangelands

43; 40%

32; 30%

32; 30%

Africa

Asia (including Melanesia)

Latin America (includ-ing Caribbean)

Data Analysis: Figure 2. Distribution of case studies by resource system (a)

and geographical region (b)

184; 54%

116; 34%

42; 12%

forestsfisheriesrangelands

Latin America (including the Caribeans); 100; 29%

Africa; 142; 42%

Asia (including Melanesia); 100; 29%

Data Analysis: Study Designs

Study Design Number of Articles

Number of case studies

Spatial comparisons: with and without interventions

87 (81%) 285 (83%)

Temporal comparisons: before and after intervention

12 (11%) 25 (7%)

before-after-control-impact (BACI) design

8 (8%) 32 (10%)

Total 107 342

Results: Temporal Comparison

Assesses environmental outcomes before and after a regime change: 25 cases in total

Irrespective of type of regime change: 16 of 25 case studies reported positive change; 1 no change, 5 negative change and 3 undetermined

Seven (7) case studies under forestry that changed from state property to mixed (state/community) resulted in positive environmental outcomes

All five (5) case studies under fisheries that changed from open access to community fisheries resulted in positive outcomes

Conclusions: avoiding open access situations and transferring user rights to communities usually lead to positive environmental impacts. No data on rangelands: only one study using temporal comparisons.

Results: Spatial Comparisons

Figure 3. Frequency of different regime comparisons across resource systems.

community

and co

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community

and open

-acces

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community

and priv

ate

mixed an

d community

mixed an

d open ac

cess

mixed an

d private

mixed an

d state

state

and open

acces

s

state

and priv

ate

community

and st

ate

private

and open

acces

s0

5

10

15

20

25

30

RANGELANDSFORESTSFISHERIES

Results: Spatial Comparisonsbetter, worse, similar, undetermined

Comparison better similar worse undetermined

Total

Community Vs Open access 23 4 2 2 31

Community Vs Private 5 4 6 13 28

Community Vs State 15 5 38 0 58

Community Vs mixed 0 0 10 0 10

State Vs Open access 12 17 1 0 30

State Vs Private 8 6 6 0 20

Private Vs Open acces 1 0 0 0 1

Mixed and Open access 6 8 0 0 14

Total 70 44 63 15 192

Environmental outcomes in different regions under forestry

In Latin America (14 to 5) and Africa (10 to 0), community forestry performs worse than State while in Asia (16 to 7) community performs better than State.

There is no sufficient data to compare between community and private forestry in all the three regions.

State property arrangements in Africa perform better than mixed regimes in many cases (5 compared to 2) while State performs worse than private sector (6 cases compared to 0).

In Africa (where data is available), results indicate that community always performs worse than mixed regimes (11 cases to 0).

As expected, all regimes perform better than open access.

Comparison between world regions under fisheries

Most comparisons are between a property rights regime and open access situations.

As expected, in Latin America and Asia (where data is available) common property rights regimes always perform better open access.

All 14 cases from Latin America and the Caribbean, comparing State fisheries to open access situations reported that the two produce similar outcomes.

13 of 16 cases from Africa, reported that state property results in better outcomes compared to open access

State Vs open access in Asia: better outcomes 5; similar outcomes 4..

Comparison between world regions under Rangelands

There were a total of 33 cases on rangelands: 31 from Africa and 2 from Asia

In Africa, where data is available,

• it is clear that community always performs worse than State (Comm. better 0; similar 0; worse 12; undetermined 2)

• No clear conclusion can be made on the comparison between community and private rangelands. (comm. better 6; similar 3; worse 8; undetermined 0)

Questions for further investigation

Differences in environmental outcomes between the three world regions indicate that some contextual factors mediate the performance of property rights regimes differently in each region.

This raises several questions worth further investigation: • Why do communal rangelands always perform worse than the state in Africa?

• Why does State control of fisheries result in similar environmental outcomes to open access situations in Latin America, contrary to expectations?

• Why do communal forestry arrangements in Africa and Latin America perform worse than the State whereas they perform better than the State in Asia?

• And why do mixed regimes (community and state) always perform better in managing forest resources in Africa than when communities operate on their own?

Many Thanks toReview team membersTeam of advisorsIFAD for funding the review