Gendered Property Rights. Common Property

If security of tenure is important for environmental stewardship, then it is important to know whose tenure is secure and whose is not. When property rights are assumed to be vested in the household rather than in individual members of the household, women's property rights (or the lack of them) are made invisible, often with adverse consequences for women and/or for the environment. On average, women have less land than men and are more likely than men to be landless.

Even in households with secure tenure, women's property rights are often insecure. In most of Africa the breadth of women's security of land tenure is narrower than men's because significantly less frequently than men's it includes the ability to rent, give away, lend, lease, sell, or bequeath. In many places women acquire access to land not in their own right but through their fathers, husbands, and brothers.

Daughters may have no rights of inheritance from their parents or may be unable to exercise their inheritance rights. The corollary to this principle of access to land is that the fruits of a woman's labor on the land often belong to her husband or his relatives, not to her. Gendered struggles over land rights may also reflect men's desire to control women's labor. The longer a property right is legally valid, the greater the security of duration of tenure.

Security of duration of tenure is a matter of particular concern for women living under a gendered property regime in which changes in marital status can be catastrophic for them. It is not uncommon in the case of divorce for property acquired by a woman during marriage to become her husband's property, leaving her destitute. Widows may have limited property rights. They may have no right to inherit their husbands' property, including trees that they themselves have planted and tended.

In the face of incursions by younger men, they may not be able to retain control of their property. The environmental effects of gendered property rights have not been widely studied. However, a Zimbabwe study found that in the context of insecure land and tree tenure rights, women, regardless of class, were significantly less likely than men to plant trees on their homestead.

Common Property. The publication of the ecologist Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" in 1968 propelled common property to the foreground of policy, scholarly, and popular debates about land use and the environment. Hardin's famous article concluded, and many policymakers and ordinary people still believe, that common property will inevitably be degraded.

This conclusion stemmed from Hardin's confusion of common property resources (in which a set of resource users manages the resource and exclude others) with open access resources (in which no one is excluded, and no one takes responsibility—everyone is a free rider, that is, a user who does not contribute to managing or sustaining the resource).

Hardin also separated his imaginary resource users from any social context and hence ruled out any possibility of rules, foresight, monitoring, alternative resource exploitation, or other proactive measures characteristic of actual property institutions. Accordingly, Hardin made it seem as if the only management solutions are either to rationalize individual behavior by privatizing property rights or to protect the property through state intervention.

To this day, privatization has persisted as the dominant policy approach, despite many scholars having documented that both private and state managers can degrade resources just as seriously as the public. Moreover, for certain resources "that are sufficiently large as to make it costly (but not impossible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from their use" (Ostrom 1990,30), such as many fisheries, or for unpredictable resources, such as dryland pastures in which the location of rainfall is highly variable, a commons system constitutes the most effective management regime.

A large body of research on common property has focused on the conditions under which such efforts succeed and fail, whether due to external factors such as the terms of trade or to internal factors such as class differences within the community. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom's "design principles" (Ostrom 1990, 90-102) regarding the sustainability of common property resources have been particularly influential.

These principles consist of (1) clearly defined boundaries for both users and resources, (2) congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions, (3) collective choice arrangements under which most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying them, (4) monitoring, (5) graduated sanctions, (6) a conflict resolution mechanism that provides rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials, (7) at least minimal recognition of appropriators' rights to organize, and (8) nested enterprises (a system in which the commons management activities are located in multiple organizational layers).

In the policy/programmatic realm, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) has emerged as an alternative to the weaknesses and inflexibility of private and state natural resource management. In contrast to policies of privatization, CBNRM often creates common property out of state property by devolving proprietary rights over specific natural resources to local people. In essence, this approach provides the community with a more central role in the assessment, planning, implementation, monitoring, and enforcement of and benefits from management strategies.

Although in the past decade there has been considerable enthusiasm for this approach to natural resource management, the circumstances under which CBNRM does and does not succeed require research.