The marine "commons" discourse

Next in the series of posts (the last one is here) on "The Tragedy at 50" (by the way, if anyone wants a hard copy of the journal issue, please email me), is Harry Scheiber's "The 'Commons' Discourse on Marine Fisheries Resources: Another Antecedent to Hardin’s 'Tragedy'". The abstract:

Throughout the fifty years since its publication, Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been regarded as a seminal paper in the environmental movement, although his emphasis on population control (which actually formed the core concern of the article) has been largely forgotten. Hardin argued that free access by a growing population to common resources would inevitably lead to the depletion of those resources, citing as one example how maritime nations’ belief in the freedom of the seas, combined with their belief in the inexhaustibility of marine resources, had brought whales and many species of fish close to extinction. Hardin failed, however, to take account of the extensive debates throughout much of the twentieth century by scientists and policymakers on the general problem of the ocean commons — what they generally termed the “dilemma of the commons” — as it applied not only to living marine resources but also to mineral resources. By mid-century, as improved fishing technology gave rise to ever greater catches, the notion of the inexhaustibility of fisheries was largely discredited; hence scientists as well as experts in both national and international law became focused on addressing the dilemma of the commons through fisheries management, and specifically by determining the Maximum Sustainable Yield. Some economists, arguing instead for maximum efficiency, urged that open access be abandoned in favor of limited entry. Such measures to resolve the dilemma of the commons were the subject of numerous conferences (including the second UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958) and were widely debated in scholarly publications and, indeed, by the late 1960s had been practically implemented by a number of laws and treaties. By 1966, national control over a twelve-mile fishing zone offshore of coastal nations had been well established. These developments regarding the oceans commons, predating Hardin’s article, were apparently either of no interest to him or (if he knew of them) purposefully subordinated to his main polemical objective, which was his Malthusian analysis of the commons issue and his call for limits on “human breeding.”

Water rights IV: Property in water: Empirical and historical evidence

(Continuing the series on water rights:)

The empirical work of Ostrom (1990; Ostrom and Gardner, 1993) and others on institutions for governing commons resources has shown that, in practice, common property can be highly successful in managing water resources, depending on the structure and functioning of the institutions involved. She and her collaborators summed up their conclusions (Ostrom et al., 2010):

Elinor Ostrom

Researchers usually distinguish four basic types of governance systems, defined in terms of who controls access to resources: private property, government property, common property, and open access (i.e., no one's property). Research has consistently shown the inefficient outcomes of open access since open access almost always leads to destruction of any resource that is in great demand. This is the problem identified in Hardin's famous essay, although he called open access "commons," which led to substantial subsequent confusion. The other three systems, however, have mixed records in terms of sustaining water resources, including both great successes and massive failures. Thus, the ability of a type of ownership to enhance sustainable resource management depends on a number of other factors…

Many legal and environmental historians have focused on historical transitions between property regimes in water, particularly two major developments in the Anglo-American legal world: the development of the "reasonable use" riparian regime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the rejection of riparian rights in favor of the system known as "prior appropriation" in the western United States in the second half of the same century.

Some historians' accounts, beginning with Walter Prescott Webb's "Great Plains Thesis" (Webb, 1931), have supported the economic view associating with aridity with private rights in water (Robert G. Dunbar (1985) 'The Adaptability of Water Law to the Aridity of the West', Journal of the West 24: 57; Percy, 2005). Yet aridity has also been associated with strict state control, as in Karl Wittfogel's (1957) hypothesis associating "hydraulic civilizations" with "oriental despotism", applied to the western American context by Donald Worster (1985).

Water rights III - Property in water: Theory

(Continuing the series on water rights:)

The question of how and why water has been governed by regimes of private, public, and common property has occupied scholars for some time, often in tandem with the normative issue of which type of property regime is best for the resource. 

Harold Demsetz

As in many other fields, economic analysis has proved to be a dominant theoretical lens for understanding the development of water rights, generating both direct insights and provoking trenchant critiques. On the level of positive theory, many have built on the framework of Harold Demsetz's (1967) theory of property rights, according to which property regimes progress from common to private property as the increasing value of the resource in question, or pressure on it, renders the advantages of its privatization greater than the administrative costs of establishing and maintaining a private-property regime. According to this theory, we should expect to see water regimes characterized by relatively open access or common property in societies and environments characterized by an abundance of water, and increasing reliance on private rights as pressure on the resource increases. An influential work in this tradition is Anderson and Hill (1975), which posits that the abandonment of a common-property regime (riparian rights) in favor of private rights (the prior appropriation doctrine) in the American West was a result of the region's aridity and consequent pressure on the resource. 

Economic analysis has also developed a normative critique of existing systems of water rights. Beginning with the work of Milliman (1956, 1959) and others, many scholars have argued that common property in water leads to waste, inefficiency, and depletion of the resource. The solution, according to this line of argument, is the creation or recognition of completely specified private property rights in water, rights that will allow the functioning of an efficient market that will move water to its most valuable uses and create incentives to avoid waste (Charles J. Meyers & Richard A. Posner (1971) Market Transfers of Water Rights: Toward an Improved Market in Water Resources. Arlington: National Water Commission; Terry L. Anderson (ed.) (1983) Water Rights: Scarce Resource Allocation, Bureaucracy, and the Environment. Cambridge: Ballinger). This sort of argument has obviously resonated with Hardin's (1968) famous article on the tragedy of the commons, and also fit in well with general enthusiasm for market solutions to policy issues in recent decades. It continues to be advanced in various contexts, such as with regard to water rights in China (Speed, 2009).

Yet other theorists have questioned the above conclusions, both positive and normative.

Property in whales

Angela Fernandez recently published a review of Robert Deal's The Law of the Whale Hunt: Dispute Resolution, Property Law, and American Whalers, 1780-1880 (Cambridge UP, 2016) at JOTWELL. There's a lot here--on the environmental background of law, on efficiency and fairness, on the relation between law on the books and law in action, and more. Some highlights:

Cooperation was also important not just to the survival but also the success of a voyage. Captains were expected to help, or at least not deliberately mislead, one another about issues like weather conditions and where whales were located. When times were good and there were plenty of whales, this fact alone would greatly reduce an incentive for captains to engage in protracted and highly confrontational dispute over any particular whale. In most cases it was better to quickly agree to go halves, or some other proportion that seemed fair in the circumstances given the efforts each had invested, and move on to chasing other whales. When the catch was not going as well, as whale stocks became depleted and whalers had to go deeper into the ocean to pursue them and in more unfamiliar waters, one whale might make the difference between a voyage that was economically viable and one that was not. Deal points out that some of the litigated cases arose during lean times. The problem is that “[m]any – indeed the vast majority – of bad seasons did not send whalemen to the courtroom.” (P. 143.) And the dispute in one of the cases that Deal discusses at length, Taber v. Jenny, happened in 1852, a year that “may well have been the most successful season in the history of the Okhotsk fishery.” (P. 139.)

So what kept whaling disputes out of the courts? Deal insists it was not (contra Melville and legal scholars such as Robert Ellickson) because industry participants had a very firm and settled sense of what the rules or customs were for settling disputes. Deal argues that captains used a jumble of different competing ideas, rules, norms, and customs, including personal ethics, to decide how to negotiate situations of conflict. He concludes that captains must have wanted it that way, “prefer[ing] to operate on the basis of vague standards rather than clear rules.” (P. 162.) And while we are often told by law and economics scholars that flexibility will lead to conflict and more litigation, on the contrary, in this case at least: the “muddy standards” of the whalemen “were remarkably successful at avoiding [both] violent disputes and litigation.” (P. 163....) 

Environmental regulation in colonial Zimbabwe

The latest Environment and History has an article by Muchaparara Musemwa, "Sic utere tuo ut alienam non laedas. From Wanton Destruction of Timber Forests to Environmentalism: The Rise of Colonial Environmental and 'Sustainability' Practices in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1938-1961". The abstract:

This article examines the roots of colonial Zimbabwe’s culture of environmentalism – described, here, as increasing social awareness of the rapid deterioration of the environment and the pressing need to take decisive action to counteract it. It argues that only a one-sided story – namely colonial conservationist discourses and practices especially as they pertained to African reserves in colonial Zimbabwe and other parts of Southern and Eastern Africa – has been the object of myriad historical analyses. Yet, there is a corresponding story that seems to have fallen between the seams of history as it is rarely articulated in Zimbabwean historiography in a systematic and comprehensive way, i.e. the origins of a colonial environmentalism – one focused more on reinforcing white settlers’ sustainable uses of natural resources and less on Africans. It chronicles how the once verdant landscapes of colonial Zimbabwe were transformed into near waste in the first four decades of colonial occupation from 1890; highlights how the diverse voices of environmental concern that appeared at the time compelled the colonial Zimbabwean state finally to institute the Commission of Inquiry into the Preservation of the Natural Resources of the Colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1938; and examines how this Commission’s recommendations became the basis for the establishment of a number of institutional regulatory systems to initiate an efficiency-oriented approach to the management of the colony’s natural resources. It highlights how the notion of ‘sustainability’ was infused into the Commission’s Report and became such a powerful trope that it laid the basis for subsequent institutional and legal environmental resource management in colonial Zimbabwe, surviving intact into the first two decades of postcolonial rule. The article further explores how the farmer–miner conflict unfolded beyond the McIlwaine Commission and how the Natural Resources Board finally led to a successful resolution of the conflict in 1961. The McIlwaine Commission Report attests to rising social and environmental concern at the ongoing ecological decline of the colony’s resources, resulting in the realisation of a resolute response in order to guarantee the sustainability and welfare of white settler society.

L. F. Hughes, Back Page, Umtali and the Eastern Districts of Southern Rhodesia (1953)

Economics and property rights in the Gold Rush

I just came across a review that I wrote and submitted a while ago for the Business History Review on Mark Kanazawa's Golden Rules: The Origins of California Water Law in the Gold Rush (U. Chicago Press, 2015). I had thought the editors would inform me when it was published... Anyway, here's what I wrote:

There's still gold in them thar hills. A century and a half after the torrent of gold-seekers to the California Sierras dried up, the flow of historical studies of the development of property rights on the gold frontier continues unabated. This work of detailed scholarship by Mark Kanazawa, an economic historian who has published extensively on water law in the western United States, is the latest entry into the auriferous regions.

Romance and adventure aside, economic and legal historians, along with property theorists, have been drawn to the California gold rush for two main reasons. First, the development of “codes” in the mining camps of the forty-niners provides a colorful case study of the institution of a system of law from scratch. Because government presence and state law were thin on the ground in gold-rush California, the ability of the miners to institute working systems of norms seems to serve as a historical example of successful private ordering. Beyond this, scholars of water law have taken a particular interest in the laws of the diggings, as the system of private rights in water that applies to this day in much of the western United States, known as the appropriation doctrine, is thought to have originated in the gold fields. So miners’ laws have received quite a lot of attention in studies hoping to explain how legal order spontaneously emerged out of chaos and why the miners abrogated the common-law regime of “riparian rights” in water (in which all landholders adjacent to the water source shared it) in favor of appropriation, based on the principle of “first in time, first in right.”

Golden Rules takes an economic approach to understanding the origin and evolution of water law in the California mining region in the decade or so following the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. After several substantial introductory chapters laying out the history of California gold mining and the ditch industry that developed to provide the water used in increasingly large and sophisticated mining operations—as well as the economic theories of property and tort he believes explain the historical development of the law—Kanazawa gets down to his analysis in detail. Chapter 5 examines the water rules adopted in the mining camps, arguing that they generally did a good job of promoting mining at an efficient scale. Chapter 6 discusses how economic forces gradually pushed disputes over water from the informal mining camp system to the official courts of the state. Chapter 7 argues that the appropriation doctrine as it developed in the California gold fields was economically efficient. Chapters 8 and 9 turn to legal issues often ignored in both gold rush histories and the legal history of water—the regulation of water quality and damage caused by bursting dams—arguing that with regard to these, too, California law provided efficient solutions.

The Colorado Doctrine in business history

I'm pleased that my book, The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier (Yale UP, 2012) continues to get reviewed. The latest is one by Todd Holmes in Business History Review. Holmes sums up the book well:

The book begins with an in-depth investigation of the mining laws that emerged in the Colorado territory following the 1859 discovery of gold. Here Schorr sets an impressive tone for the following chapters, as he seamlessly interweaves his legal and historical training in research and analysis. Drawing on ninety-one mining codes from seventy-eight districts, Schorr demonstrates how the principle of equality, modified by the rule of sufficiency, limited mining claims in both size and ownership. And as he shows, this Lockean principle of equal access soon spread from land to water. From Colorado's territorial laws and constitution to the 1882 Coffin decision that etched the young state into legal history, the water monopoly bestowed in common law to riparian lands was consistently undercut and, ultimately, abolished in favor of the broader distribution achieved through the system of prior appropriation (first in time, first in right). In the final two chapters, Schorr charts how the principle of distributive justice continued to influence Colorado's water laws in the decades that followed; in the process, he squarely challenges the varying interpretations of corporate greed and market efficiency often ascribed to the law of appropriation. Contrary to Gilded Age stereotypes of corporations running amok in the West, Colorado courts consistently ruled in favor of small farmers and placed heavy restrictions on the size, access, and contracts of irrigation companies. Such efforts of fair distribution, however, did not make for efficient markets—a fact that Schorr details in his chapter on the beneficial use clause and the diminishing productivity inherent in its restriction on water right transfers.

A couple of the earlier reviews were covered here and here; Google Scholar has links to a lot more.

How we got from there to here: Changing conceptions of property and the environment

Discussing my current research on water law in Mandate Palestine and the British Empire more broadly with my law school colleagues last week, I noted (and enjoyed) their surprise and amusement at discovering the gap between the way lawyers, economists, and others involved in environmental policy today think about efficient property regimes in natural resources and the way people did so a century ago.