ELE 2007 Symposium

October 26, 2007, ELE presents a symposium on Property Rights in Environmental Assets: Economic and Legal Perspectives

For information about the symposium, please contact Jennifer Pullen ele@email.arizona.edu.

Map of Symposium location in Room 309, Arizona State Museum North.

Participants

Participant Biographies
David Adelman, Arizona
Jim Boyd, Resources for the Future
Bonnie Colby, Arizona
Kirsten Engel, Arizona
Robert Deacon, UCSB
George Frisvold, Arizona
Robert Innes, Arizona
D. Bruce Johnsen, George Mason
Jason S. Johnston, Penn
Gary D. Libecap, UCSB
Dean Lueck, Arizona
Anup Malani, Chicago
Thomas Merrill, Columbia
Marc Miller, Arizona
Barak Orbach, Arizona
Tauhid Rahman, Arizona
Carol M. Rose, Arizona
Roger Sedjo, Resources for the Future
Kathy Segerson, UConn
Henry Smith, Yale
Katrina Wyman, NYU

Papers

Full text of papers will be available here in early 2008. In addition, the papers will be published as a proceedings issue of the Arizona Law Review.

Open-Access Losses and Delay in the Assignment of Property Rights
Gary D. Libecap, Donald Bren Professor, Corporate Environmental Management, Bren School of Environmental Management, UC Santa Barbara
Even though formal property rights are the theoretical response to open access involving natural and environmental resources, they typically are adopted late after considerable waste has been endured. Instead, the usual response in local, national, and international settings is to rely upon uniform rules and standards as a means of constraining behavior. While providing some relief, these do not close the externality and excessive exploitation along unregulated margins continues. As external costs and resource values rise, there finally is a resort to property rights of some type. Transfers and other concessions to address distributional concerns affect the ability of the rights arrangement to mitigate open-access losses. This paper outlines the reasons why this pattern exists and presents three empirical examples of overfishing, over extraction from oil and gas reservoirs, and excessive air pollution to illustrate the main points.

Big Roads, Big Rights: Varieties of Public Infrastructure and Their Impact on Environmental Resources
Carol M. Rose, Lhose Chair in Water and Natural Resources Law, James Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona
This article compares two types of public infrastructure—roads and property rights—with particular reference to their role in altering the natural environment. Roads affect environmental resources directly, e.g., by fragmenting habitat and introducing new species; just as important, they link areas commercially and tend to reduce local resource diversity. Modernist property rights have similar impacts, often undermining existing informal practices, introducing unfamiliar persons and resource uses, and fostering a wider trade that works together with roads to reduce localized resource diversity. New kinds of property rights for environmental protection, however, have the very different mission of curtailing commerce beyond a certain level, as in roadless areas and caps on resource use. This divergence from the traditional commercial mission of public infrastructure could create difficulties, particularly in garnering support for environmental property rights.

Governing Water: The Semicommons of Fluid Property Rights
Henry Smith, Fred A. Johnston Professor of Property and Environmental Law, Yale University
The paper applies the framework of exclusion and governance strategies for delineating property rights to water law and its evolution. I argue that riparianism and, somewhat more surprisingly, first appropriation fall toward the governance end of the spectrum and that delineation cost helps explain this, as well as some of the evolution in water law over time.

The Role of Property Rights in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
Jason Scott Johnston, Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Uncontrolled human greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and their effect in causing climate change are often taken as a paradigmatic example of the uncontrolled overuse of a common property resource. A well-known regulatory response to climate change is to create tradable rights to emit carbon dioxide and other GHGs.; Short to medium run climate change is inevitable, however, regardless of the success or failure of such a system of tradable rights. This paper argues that in the short to medium run, the primary determinants of the costs and benefits of climate change, and how those costs vary across different nations, will be national and sub national property rights systems.; The paper explores how climate change adaptation is likely to vary under alternative property rights regimes.

Bioprospecting and Biodiversity Conservation: What Happens When Discoveries Are Made?
George B. Frisvold, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics University of Arizona
There has been extensive debate in the economics literature over whether private-sector bioprospecting for pharmaceutical compounds can create significant incentives for conservation of biological diversity. This paper examines how an actual discovery of a medically and economically important compound affected conservation incentives. A case study of the discovery and commercial development of the anti-cancer drug taxol from the Pacific yew tree highlights some neglected issues in the debate over bioprospecting and conservation incentives. The discovery of taxol and the search for taxol-like compounds illustrates how bioprospecting can substitute one threat to biodiversity from habitat conversion with another threat from over-harvesting. The paper will discuss how the relationship between bioprospecting and biodiversity conservation depends crucially on underlying property rights regimes.

The Optimal Design of Property Rights in Marine Fisheries
Katrina Wyman, Associate Professor of Law, New York University
For several decades, economists have been promoting individual transferable quotas (ITQs) as the best way to manage fisheries. However, as evidence has grown recently that fish populations are rapidly dropping, prominent fisheries scientists have advocated another policy approach: setting aside marine reserves where fishing is prohibited or severely curtailed. ITQs and marine reserves mirror the use of individual private rights and communal protected areas such as wilderness areas in the U.S. to manage land. I propose to examine the optimal design of property rights in marine fisheries, given the accumulating evidence about the rapid decline in fish populations.

Improving Efficiency by Assigning Harvest Rights to Fishery Cooperatives: Evidence from the Chignik Salmon Coop
Robert T. Deacon, Professor of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Dominic Parker, Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Chris Costello, Associate Professor of Environmental Management, University of California, Santa Barbara
An individual transferable quota (ITQ) system that relies on a single price to allocate harvest rights in a fishery will not be fully efficient unless the stock in question is uniform in economic value. Variations in the location or density of portions of a stock can give rise to corresponding variations in value, leading harvesters to compete for the best portions of the stock. The size of the waste that can arise from this competition is governed in part by the degree of heterogeneity—greater heterogeneity leads to greater losses. Similar losses can arise from inefficient search in cases where rights are not spatially delineated. These potential losses can be eliminated either by coordinating fishing effort among quota holders or by delineating ITQ harvest rights more precisely. After presenting this argument in intuitive terms, we focus on two topics: identifying factors that determine the size of the potential gains from coordination and examining case study evidence on 'harvester cooperatives' as a management tool and legal institution for overcoming these inefficiencies.