Abstract
Besides providing assurance of property rights as discussed in the previous chapter, governments can influence the environmental implications of property rights through the intervention in ‘private’ property rights on behalf of the environment. Private, in this context, means property rights not owned by government, i.e. includes both ‘private property regimes’ and ‘common property regimes’ as well as open-access. This chapter, therefore, focuses on the question to what extent government intervention in private property rights is desirable from an environmental point of view.
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Given the distinction between de facto and de jure property rights discussed in chapter 2, the task of government may well be to avoid conflicts between de facto property rights rather than de jure property rights, at least in the short term.
The counter argument is, however, that customary rights often can also be claimed in court.
Eggertson (1996, 1998), by the way, points out that the costs of governance of private property rights are not to be underestimated due to the high costs of exclusion.
In practice, the reaction of the traditional owners of resources to government appropriation of property rights is often environmentally less dramatic than that of the illegitimate new owners, since the former frequently depend on the existence of the resource for their livelihood. In economic terms, their choice set as rational decision-makers is more constrained than that of the ‘new owners.’
Future research needs to look at the relationship between c-c levels and environmental state intervention to determine if strategic behavior on the part of potential environmental ‘villains’ exists. Strategic polluters, for instance, could anticipate a response by a state with high c-c levels and therefore reduce their environmentally polluting activities. In other words, while the environmental desirability of government intervention in theory is.
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Fuchs, D.A. (2003). The environmental desirability of government intervention. In: An Institutional Basis for Environmental Stewardship. Environment & Policy, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0709-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0709-1_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6166-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-0709-1
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