Journal
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
Volume 29, Issue 10, Pages 1649-1672Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/S0305-750X(01)00063-8
Keywords
common-pool resources; property rights; resource management; sustainability; institutions
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The literature on common property-based resource management comprises many important studies that seek to specify the conditions under which groups of users will self-organize and sustainably govern resources upon which they depend. Using three of the more comprehensive such studies, and with an extensive review of writings on the commons, this paper demonstrates that the enterprise of generating lists of conditions under which commons are governed sustainably is a flawed and impossibly costly research task. For a way out, the paper examines the relative merits of statistical, comparative, and case study approaches to studying the commons. It ends with a plea for careful research design and sample selection, construction of causal mechanisms, and a shift toward comparative and statistical rather than single-case analyses. Such steps are necessary for a coherent, empirically-relevant theory of the commons. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
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