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This text reviews the transformations of the commons in Spain in the long 19th century based on the notion of "bundles of rights". The contention is that the process of change was prompted by the clashes between alternative models, beginning with privatization or preservation and culminating in a complex landscape of property rights. In terms of privatization, several alternatives were advocated and eventually implemented, depending on the social groups that promoted them and their balance of power. In stylized form, two options that while not necessarily incompatible stand in opposition: on the one hand, privatization in the form of large property units with the land concentrated in the hands of an elite of creditors and investors, and on the other, small plots involving broader social participation and greater access. In turn, the preservation of communal lands did not rule out the privatization of their use, in some cases in favor of large industrial companies in the timber, resin, and cork sectors, and on other occasions in the service of social inclusion policies through the distribution of plots for their cultivation by the rural proletariat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of technological progress, established traditional legal concepts require constant refi nement to permit their optimal regulation. For example, virtual (digital) “things” — or tokens (NFTs) — are subject to disputes concerning whether it is preferable to rely on a traditional legal institution (e.g., property and intellectual property) or create a completely new regime “from scratch”. Using historical and comparative legal methods based on doctrinal sources, the present work explores the concepts of thing and property in the common law of nation states. The closest functional analogues in the civil law systems the res (“thing”) and in rem (“right”) are compared. Common law in rem rights are established to have emerged in the Middle Ages in form of the feudal system of different statuses with respect to land (estates). Later, under the infl uence of Wesley Hohfeld’s research on legal opposites and correlatives, this system was substantially modernized through the deconstruction of property into a “bundle of rights”. An analysis of a published translation of Joshua Fairfi eld’s article convincingly demonstrates that cryptocurrency, just as any token, is indistinguishable in its principal aspects from a “thing” in the civil-law sense. A similar conclusion is reached in the context of Russian law: the main criteria of “thingness” — materiality and the possibility of being the object of exclusive possession — are equally fulfi lled when it comes to tokens, land plots or chairs in one’s apartment. Accordingly, intuitive notions about things as products having real nature are obviously outdated and should be replaced with a jurisprudential understanding of the “thing” as a result of social interaction, rather than having a certain nature in and of itself. The important functions of materiality consist in a reduction of information costs for participants in legal relations due to the natural formation of intuitive expectations, as well as prejudices about the scope and characteristics of these rights.

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With the advance of smart IoT devices (Internet of Things) the amount of valuable data will increase dramatically. With its recently enacted Data Act (DA) the EU introduces new data access and sharing rights for the users of IoT devices. This article analyzes how the DA will change the bundle of rights on non-personal IoT data regarding who can control, access, use, share, and monetize this data. In a first step, we apply the property rights theory (esp. the approach of Barzel) for explaining the status quo of IoT data governance. Here the manufacturers can get through the technical design of their IoT devices exclusive de facto control over IoT data ("capture" of data). In a second step, we analyze how the DA changes this de facto bundle of rights in order to unlock more IoT data for innovation, competition, and empowerment of users. Since the DA is not very clear and partly contradictory, three different concepts for the design of this bundle of rights are analyzed and compared: A data holder-centric IP-like concept, a user-centric concept, and the concept of co-generated data. The article analyzes all three concepts from an economic perspective including relevant market failures regarding IoT data in B2B and B2C contexts. For achieving the objectives of the DA, especially regarding unlocking of data for innovation, bundles of rights should be chosen which reject notions of exclusivity and enable broad access and sharing of IoT data. The enacted Data Act, which still clings too much to the exclusivity of data and includes too many hurdles for data sharing, cannot be expected to contribute much to achieving these objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The brown bear reintroduction program in the Pyrenees was launched in 1996, once their population was considered extinct in the central parts of the mountain range. The increasing number of livestock casualties caused by bear attacks forced the public administrations to adopt a package of protection measures, which included hiring mountain shepherds to tend the local farmers' flocks during the summer grazing season. Although these measures were deemed to restore age-old communal shepherding practices that had recently been abandoned by bringing together bears, livestock, and shepherds in the high mountain pastures, the bear program has produced an overlap of communal and state-driven territorialities. Drawing attention to the ambiguous position of mountain shepherds within a new pastoralism-conservation network, situated between local farmers and bear program's decision-makers, this article argues that the commons must be taken into consideration as it persists in current times, even within a high-modern territoriality unfolded under different forms of environmentality. The shepherds epitomize the hybridization of different territorialities, situated on the edge of the production-based economy developed by the local farmers and the amenity-based economy behind the bear reintroduction program. There is a shared, though differentiated capitalist view of natural resources. Using the main theories of power in political ecology and taking the variables of 'format, management, governance, and institution' to frame the commons as an enduring local collective farming resource, this article scrutinizes the collision between the two types of capitalism, usually misidentified as a rural-urban divide. It also shows the extent to which the shifting existence of the commons, crystallized through the ambiguous position of the shepherds, may provide us with a fruitful toolkit to better understanding human-wildlife conflicts based on the cleavage between farming and conservationist sectors.

The question of the impact of institutional arrangements on the nature of goods is insufficiently addressed in the literature. By the nature of goods, we refer to the economic taxonomy of goods, meaning their privateness is defined according to their degrees of excludability and subtractability. This paper aims to fill this research gap by examining whether institutional arrangements developed for the management of private goods can reduce the degrees of excludability of these goods. To this end, we analyse four collective farmland management projects in the Isère department in France. We adapt the tool of property as a bundle of rights in order to characterize the impact of these projects on the nature of farmland. Our results show that the distribution of land rights, as well as the rules designed to define land rights, influence the degree of excludability of farmland. We discuss the impact of these findings on public policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholars and activists have drawn attention to the importance of women's land rights, and studies focused on irrigation have explored the gendered relationships between land and water rights. Yet little of this work has focused on the relationship between land and water rights for domestic and productive purposes more broadly. Within rural communities, women and men have different rights to both land and water. We explore these interconnected relationships using community profiles, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews from two communities as well as survey data collected from multiple adult members of rural households in Kilifi County, Kenya. Using a bundle of rights framework, we find that few individuals hold the complete bundle of rights over water, and the extent to which the rights are acknowledged by others and enforceable varies by the land-water tenure system. The full bundle of rights to water is most likely to be complete and most robust for men who have private water points on household land they hold. Even then, other people may assert claims to water at the water point, although these claims may involve negotiation or payment. Many water rights across the land-tenure systems are shared with others rather than being held by one individual. As such, the ability to negotiate water access is particularly important. The duration of the rights, or the length of time for which the rights are held, is embedded in social relations and exchange, particularly on others' household land. Women more than men seem to maintain a complicated set of social networks that allow them to negotiate for water from other women who manage the water transactions. The process of negotiation needs to be re-articulated each time. Thus, the duration of these rights to water depends on the ongoing relationships.

Sustainable Land Management (SLM) is one of the key policy responses being implemented to curb land degradation in the highlands of Ethiopia. However, there is scant evidence to what extent Land Tenure Institutional Factors (LTIFs) influence small landholders' on-farm investment in SLM. The overall objective of this study is, therefore, to understand the extent to which LTIFs influence on-farm SLM investment in the highlands of Ethiopia through unbundling tenure security (de jure, de facto, and perceived) across a bundle of rights. Survey data were collected between April and May 2021 from 2296 smallholder households and 6692 parcels of 19 highland woredas (districts) in three regional states (Amhara, Oromia, and SNNP) in Ethiopia. A probit regression model was used to estimate the average marginal effects of LTIFs quantitatively and supported by an in-depth qualitative analysis. The results revealed that 10 out of 16 LTIF-related variables have significantly influenced households' on-farm investment in SLM with average marginal effect ranging from a minimum of 3% (tree tenure security risks) to a maximum of 14% (possession of land certificates), at 95% confidence interval, compared to a mean probability of 45%. The results also revealed that some of the households' socio-economic and demographic factors and parcel-specific variables have significantly influenced on-farm SLM investment. These imply two policy issues. Firstly, it strengthens the notion that security of tenure may be a necessary condition, but not a sufficient, factor to incentivize smallholders' on-farm SLM investment. Secondly, an in-depth analysis of the security of tenure categories across a bundle of rights is necessary to help formulate context-specific SLM policy and strategy incentivizing smallholders' on-farm SLM investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is mandated to lead in the sustainable management of the country's natural resources. The continuous migration in forest and forest lands (FFL) and succeeding forest cover loss resulted in tenure reforms, with bundles of rights devolved to communities. Bundle of rights refers to a specific set of privilege granted to an individual or group of people, to do certain things with land or property. It includes access, use, management, exclusion and alienation rights. This study documented the migration trend and mode of land acquisition, extent of individual/collective rights, impact of secure tenure on livelihood and forest conservation, and how property rights in Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) areas improved. Migration happened in three important periods, with migrants wanting to secure better livelihood. The issuance of tenure instruments legitimized claims, allowed tenure holders to use, manage, and exclude others from accessing and using resources. While the 'bundle of rights' is within the terms and conditions of the DENR, the tenure reform is still a better option than any other programs implemented in the past. Lessons learned may be used as basis in further improving the provisions of the CBFM program in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]