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This paper explores how property rights arrangements affect the equity, efficiency and sustainability of high-altitude rangeland management in Bhutan from the perspectives of rangeland users. Property rights affect how natural resources are allocated to individuals, communities and institutions and how they are managed. In Bhutan, only grazing rights are granted to rangeland users, as ownership of rangeland lies with the State. Three case study areas were selected across Bhutan with different levels of rangeland degradation, governance arrangements and property rights regimes. Semi-nomadic yak herders, sedentary livestock farmers and government officials participated in 40 semi-structured interviews and nine focus group discussions between 2013 and 2014. Findings revealed that historical inequities exist with private leases and some communal leases, but government-supported leases with management rights are considered more equitable. All property rights systems can become unproductive and inefficient with increasing populations, but communal areas are at greater risk of sub-optimal resource use and conflicts. Respondents were concerned about the lack of management rights, uncertainty over future lease arrangements and climate change impacts. This research revealed that (i) assignment of incomplete property rights is detrimental to efficient and sustainable natural resource management; (ii) banning of traditional practices such as burning, clearing and cutting of shrubs and bushes could undermine conservation by triggering natural resource degradation; (iii) granting of management rights in the bundle of rights is vital to encourage provisioning and maintenance activities; and (iv) in the absence of official contracts, deeds or titles which provide tenure security and political legitimacy, equitable distribution, clear boundary demarcation with written norms and rules are not sufficient to foster long-term investment in provisioning and maintenance activities. We discuss the implications of the findings for delayed implementation of the Land Act 2007 aimed at a more equitable redistribution of use rights and improved high-altitude rangeland management in Bhutan.

Possibilities to prevent premature destruction of housing privatized by inefficient owners are complicated by the imperfection and inflexibility of current legislation, which defines property rights in general and in an apartment building in particular. This requires research into both new economic facts that justify the need to change legislation and effective legal structures for efficent actions in housing management. One of the approach explored in the article is an attempt to systematically analyze and decompose the concepts of «property», «property rights» and «property relations» for the possible distribution of a bundle of rights and related financial obligations between different entities potentially capable of proper maintenance of housing within its rights.The genesis of economic and legal concepts of «property» in the context of objective socio-economic processes is studied by the methods of historical and logical analysis using numerous scientific publications. Firstly, legal and economic concepts of property have been separated. Secondly, continental and anglo-saxon legal concepts together with their economic background have been analised. Thirtly, the different ways of property rigts classification have been used to define appropriate managerial and financial possibilities. The projection is made on the minimisation of deformations caused by the current system of home ownership, the problems of inconsistency of homeowners’ rights with their responsibilities and the ability to use and reproduce it sustainably without the need to subsidize the owners. The way of legislative reduction of the burden of housing maintenance by owners with the corresponding reduction of the rights of possession and the order with preservation of the rights of use behind them is offered.

After the brown bear reintroduction program was launched in the Pyrenees in 1996, the French and Spanish States fostered and funded a regrouping policy to protect the sheep flocks from the bear attacks. Drawing on a comparative analysis between two Catalan districts in north-eastern Spain (Val d'Aran and Pallars Sobira) and the Ariege district in south-western France, this article scrutinises the extent to which the transformation of shepherding practices induced by the renewed presence of bears can be deemed as a return of the 'commons' to the Pyrenees. The emergence of public regrouped herds resembles an old and until then abandoned pastoral format, the communal herd. However, this iteration of collective action is promoted and tightly controlled by the State, whereas previously, local farmers used to manage the old communal system themselves. The regrouping policy mimics the morphology of locally generated models following historical property rights logic, while incorporating a modern form of public governmentality. The conceptualisation of property as a bundle of rights and the two ethnographic studies serve to critically engage with the notion of the commons and their return. The literature on environmentality and territorialisation allows us to read this State-driven policy through the lenses of imposition and dispossession.

This article examines how the property rights in land have come to be a constitutive element of social citizenship. Reviewing the theoretical developments on the idea of social citizenship since Marshall’s seminal essay onCitizenship and Social Class(1950), this introductory article identifies four processes which bring property rights to the centre stage of social rights. First, recognition of entitlement beyond ownership opens up different social functions of property. Social citizenship as a tool is able to demand contextually appropriate rights from the bundle of rights that property is constituted of. Second, the idea of social citizenship is global today, and has transcended nation-state boundaries. How trade and communications impact property in land shapes the realisation of social rights. Three, active citizens contribute to the creation of public spaces in emerging urban residential areas. Citizens make social claims on such spaces through radical forms of insurgent citizenship. Four, planning as a tool, which organises property for the realisation of citizens’ social rights, is able to meet the competing objectives of human rights and speculative profiteering by real estate owners. These four aspects become essential to understand how social citizenship is unfolding, particularly in the Global South.

The article discusses the impact of conceptual ideas about ownership in an economic turnover. The concept of ownership creates general conditions for its legal regulation. According to the author, the continental unitary ownership model focuses on securing and protecting property rights, while the concept of shared ownership(as a combination of partial interests) tends to ensure the dynamics of property turnover and the involvement of a larger number of subjects in investment processes. For certain economic conditions, the unitary and divided concepts of ownership create mechanisms that ensure the satisfaction of the demands of the economic turnover (market). Property valuation as an applied economic science serves the needs of the market as an institution independent of the subjects, providing feedback between the existing market prices and the fundamental (internal) market value of property rights. The author concludes that for appraisal science, which inherited the conceptual and methodological apparatus of the American theory of appraisal activity, the concept of ownership fully corresponds to the theory of the “bundle of rights”, i. e. concepts of shared ownership dominant in the Anglo-American legal family. This circumstance led to the de facto decorative character of the Russian assessment under the conditions of the Russian civil law, which quite firmly adheres to the continental doctrine of unitary ownership. Considering digital assets as a new class of economic values, authentic to their circulation environment (Internet), the author concludes that at the present time, when transitioning to a digital economy, a conceptual rethinking of property concepts is practically necessary for the further development of valuation science, according to a request formed by civil turnaround in terms of digital transformation.

This article relies on the premise that to understand the significance of Open Access Repositories (OARs) it is necessary to know the context of the debate. Therefore, it is necessary to trace the historical development of the concept of copyright as a property right. The continued relevance of the rationales for copyright interests, both philosophical and pragmatic, will be assessed against the contemporary times of digital publishing. It follows then discussion about the rise of Open Access (OA) practice and its impact on conventional publishing methods. The present article argues about the proper equilibrium between self-interest and social good. In other words, there is a need to find a tool in order to balance individuals’ interests and common will. Therefore, there is examination of the concept of property that interrelates justice (Plato), private ownership (Aristotle), labour (Locke), growth of personality (Hegel) and a bundle of rights that constitute legal relations (Hohfeld). This examination sets the context for the argument.

When state regulations prevent owners from certain uses of their property, is this action of the state a taking of property which requires compensation? One way of answering this problem, within a framework viewing property as a bundle of rights, is to inquire into whether the incident of use is an essential element of the bundle making up the property. Given the difficulties with figuring out what is essential and what is not, I propose an alternative solution, which does not give up the bundle-of-rights framework, but which, while assuming all incidents to be equally essential, it concentrates, instead, upon the legal entitlements conveying those incidents. I begin by arguing that while the incident of possession may be expressed by a right to exclude, the incident of use is expressed by a Hohfeldian liberty, and then I consider the consequences of this argument for the question of regulatory takings. I argue that while the liberty to use does not render the incident of use meaningless (at least, insofar as regulation of property use is concerned), there is nonetheless a significant distinction between transgressing a right and transgressing a liberty, and this implies that what it takes for an infringement of the right to exclude to be translated into a taking of the (whole) property is less than what it takes for the infringement of the liberty to use to be translated into a taking of property. As I show in the paper, we can achieve this result either by means of an argument from ‘constitutional residue’ or by means of an argument from the specification of constitutional rights.

This paper shows that with respect to data the legal category of "property" (physical property or intellectual property) is not a suitable model for dealing with the complexity of data governance problems. Although data can be a valuable asset and might need incentives for its generation, the economic and technological conditions regarding data differ significantly from the problems regarding physical goods, innovation, and creative works. Through the much easier excludability and the greater importance of the non-rivalry and context-dependency of the use of data, not the incentive problem for data generation but the problems of access and sharing of data have become the most urgent policy issues. One particularly important reason can be the exclusive de facto control of firms over data, for which no formal property rights exist, but which can lead to market failures with respect to competition and innovation. The "bundle of rights" approach (based upon the economic theory of property rights) with its flexibility and wide range of options, how to specify these rights and to whom these rights can be assigned, offers a framework that allows for finding appropriate data governance solutions that fit to the specific economic and technological conditions of different industries and contexts. The paper also shows that current digital policy discussions can be interpreted as discussions about the proper specification and assignment of bundles of rights on data (as, e.g., with regard to the GDPR, data portability or the Digital Markets Act).

Existing literature on China’s urbanisation has been based primarily on the expansion of cities and towns with little attention paid to urban renewals. Wasteful use of urban land has been conventionally attributed to the ambiguous definition and ineffective protection of property rights. This study examines the recent practices of urban redevelopment in Guangzhou – a site chosen by the central authorities for the experiment of urban renewals (san jiu gai zao 三旧改造). The research identifies a local practice in which institutional changes are made not in the delineation of land property rights but instead in the redistribution of the benefits to be made from land redevelopment. Original land users are motivated to engage in urban renewals by a share of the land conveyance income previously monopolised by the state. Land use intensity and efficiency have been improved along with intensified social exclusion and marginalisation. Land property rights are practiced not so much as a bundle of rights with standardised and uniform legal assignments but more as a diverse set of local and informal arrangements adaptable to various political and social conditions. Findings of this research cast doubt over the perceived notion that uniform and unambiguous property rights definition is the prerequisite for improved land use efficiency and call for a critical evaluation of the current urban renewal policies that completely ignore the interests of the migrant population who outnumber local villagers by a large margin.

This article invokes a concept of ‘community-based individual property rights’ as individual property rights recognised in a communal property system by virtue of community membership. It employs mixed methods, including a comparative analysis that reviews and develops the ‘bundle of rights’ perspective in the Chinese context and an analysis of a large dataset of judgments recently made publicly accessible. It sets out an analytical framework which appears more advantageous in helping researchers arrive at a better explanation of the current rights structure in rural China. The article concludes that the concept of ‘community-based individual property rights’ has greater analytical and explanatory force than existing concepts based on continental civil law. The conclusion also challenges the common assumption that common law property theories never work in non-common law jurisdictions and that the Chinese property system is irrelevant to developing common law property theories.

National audience; La gestion des ressources achoppe souvent sur les questions foncières, qu'il s'agisse d'urbanisme, de protection de l'environnement ou de développement agricole. Dans ce contexte se multiplient des initiatives d’acteurs divers, entraînant des changements notables dans la relation complexe existant entre propriété et usage des terres. De récents travaux transdisciplinaire en géographie et économie institutionnelle ont analysé le mécanisme des changements à l’œuvre, en s’appuyant sur les concepts d'innovation sociale et de bouquet de droits. Avec des entrées différentes mais tous deux multi-échelles, les cas du mouvement Terre de Liens (acteur de la société civile) ; et du Bail rural à clauses environnementales (nouvelle modalité du droit du fermage) ont été étudiés. On observe que la relation entre propriété et usage des terres agricoles s’ouvre à une réappropriation des droits de gestion par les propriétaires et gestionnaires, portant des objectifs environnementaux ou de développement agricole territorialisé. Ce rôle est souvent nouveau pour ces acteurs aux légitimités variées. La relation s’inscrit dans une gouvernance multi-acteurs élargie, qui étend les attentes sociétales. La relation avec l’usager varie de la co-construction à la quasi-hiérarchie, avec des résultats variés selon qu’il partage ou non avec le propriétaire un référentiel agricole commun. Les changements s’opèrent dans un aller-retour entre différentes échelles territoriales, y compris nationale, et dans un dialogue avec les institutions, auquel la société civile prend part. En effet, l'un des cas étudiés montrent la manière dont une règle institutionnelle devient norme de coordination pour les acteurs locaux, tandis que l'autre montre comment un acteur représentant la société civile peut progressivement s'institutionnaliser. Cette transformation des coordinations révèle de manière concrète la difficile conciliation des intérêts publics et privés, un défi avéré pour les transitions à venir.

A essência do Código Florestal brasileiro é uma alteração nos direitos de propriedade que restringem os usos que os proprietários podem fazer da terra. Neste trabalho, a literatura da nova economia das instituições relacionada à direitos de propriedade é usada para analisar as dificuldades e problemas envolvidos em uma reespecificação de direitos de propriedade desta natureza. Quatro conceitos desta literatura são descritos e aplicados para entender os problemas que o Código Florestal tem encontrado e que certamente irão persistir na nova versão do programa iniciada em 2012: (i) direitos de propriedade como um feixe de direitos (bundle of rights), (ii) evolução de direitos de propriedade, (iii) dependência da trajetória (path dependence) e (iv) 8 princípios para governança de Elinor Ostrom. O trabalho argumenta que a principal questão para o funcionamento do Código Florestal é o nível de incerteza relacionado ao hiato entre as especificações de jure e de facto dos direitos de propriedade. The Brazilian Forest Code restricts landowners’ uses of the land. Changes in property rights are therefore the core element of the program. In this paper the new institutional literature on property rights is used to analyze the main difficulties involved in such a re-specification of rights. Four concepts from this literature are described and applied to better understand the issues that have hindered the program in the past and that affect the current version of the program initiated in 2012: (i) property rights as a ‘bundle of rights’, (ii) evolution of property rights, (iii) path dependence; and Ostrom’s 8 design principles. The paper argues that the key issue for the Forest Code is the level of uncertainty of the gap between the de jure and de facto specification of property rights.

High altitude rangeland and livelihood systems in Bhutan are undergoing changes in resource availability, population and user rights. This paper explores the existing governance structures of high altitude rangelands in Bhutan using Ostrom’s design principles as a framework for analysis. Qualitative interviews and focus group discussions were used to capture perceptions of 151 herders, sedentary livestock farmers and government officials across three case study sites. The research showed that most high altitude rangelands in the three case study sites have clear boundaries using natural and manmade landmarks along with a list of eligible users (design principle 1). Herders and livestock farmers have developed customary norms and rules to enforce and engender collective choice agreements for governance of high altitude rangeland (design principle 3). Community guards, appointed on rotational basis, guarded communal pastures against infringement (design principle 4). Herders and livestock farmers have developed graduated penalty system (design principle 5) and they were generally able to resolve most conflicts locally however some were resolved through district courts (design principle 6). However, rights to organize (design principle 7) and a nested enterprise approach (design principle 8) did not feature explicitly in local governance discourses and narratives. Incongruence between provision and appropriation activities under existing governance structures of high altitude rangeland in the case study sites, may be attributed to assignment of incomplete property rights (e.g. lack of management rights) in the bundle of rights. The research demonstrated assigning management rights in the bundle of rights and conformance to design principle 2 are inextricably linked, and vital for sustainable governance of high altitude rangeland. One way to institutionalize Ostrom’s design principles into natural resource governance is formalizing and codifying them in the form of a written group constitution and by-laws. The role of government policies, acts and laws that inform and constrain high altitude rangeland management are explored and changes suggested for improving the current governance system of high altitude rangeland in Bhutan.

Through two rounds of land contracting, rural households have been allocated a bundle of rights in land. We observe significant differences across villages in the amount of land to which villagers retain a claim and the institutional mechanisms governing the exchange of land rights. This study reveals the perpetuation and expansion of non-market mechanisms accruing to the benefit of village cadres and state officials and only limited emergence of market mechanisms in which households are primary beneficiaries. It identifies factors in economic, political and legal domains that incentivize and enable state officials and local cadres to capture returns from use of land. Relatedly, the study finds differences in conflict over property-rights regimes. Drawing on a pilot survey carried out by the authors in November of 2011 in Shaanxi and Jiangsu provinces (192 households in 24 villages), this paper seeks to explain heterogeneity and change in property-rights regimes over time and across space.

In seeking to achieve poverty alleviation and environmental conservation, public policy has often centred on guaranteeing land titles to local peoples. However, such approaches have brought unintended outcomes, replacing small-scale economies and natural areas by intensive exploitation of resources with no clear improvement in local people’s wellbeing. To understand this, we go beyond a general political ecology framing to consider relations between sustainability and land tenure, focusing on the intersection of economics, ecology and anthropology to understand how land tenure, property and use play out on the ground. We draw together different concepts including bundle of rights, de facto and de jure resource use, property regimes, density-dependence and non-equilibrium theory. The significance of this three-discipline view is illustrated through a case study of the Pantanal wetland, Brazil, where conservationists, the government and the local population contest ownership of the Paraguay River floodplain. Government sought to address conflicts around tenure and access through a narrow view of property, which failed to encompass the overlapping layers of land tenure, property and use on the ground and only served to create further legal battles. This article concludes that a more complex view combining the three perspectives is needed in the case of the Pantanal, and in other cases of contested property rights, in order to resolve conflicting claims and foster sustainability. We dissect both the power plays involved between different groups competing for control of a valuable resource, and the legal frameworks which can and should provide checks and balances in the system. The more nuanced grasp that emerges of local systems of tenure and access, of how these diverge from western property concepts, and of their environmental implications favours a better understanding of local realities, allowing for better management policy and consequently contributing more effectively towards poverty alleviation and environmental protection.

We used a mixed-methods approach to assess the impact of a ‘forest-friendly’ titling program on previously untitled lands surrounding the Cuyabeno Reserve in Ecuador. Such programs are part of an increasing trend in tenure formalization intended to simultaneously strengthen tenure security, reduce deforestation, and open the door for more incentive-based conservation programs. We use quasi-experimental methods to estimate and compare the impact of titling on forest outcomes for lands that are titled with certain limitations on the ownership bundle of rights, alongside lands titled but without these restrictions. This quantitative analysis is paired with results from a series of focus group interviews with landowners to understand their experiences with the titling effort, particularly tied to the restrictions. Our results point to a statistically significant impact of titling with restrictions on reducing deforestation by 34%, whereas titling without such restrictions resulted in no significant effect. When we explore impacts according to annual deforestation rates, the results suggest that titled lands are buffered from the surges in deforestation that otherwise occurred on untitled lands and more broadly across the region. While ‘forest-friendly’ restrictions had more of an effect on forest outcomes than titled lands without, the insights shared by landowners suggest important concerns about equity and unjust burdens on current households that could risk livelihood options for future generations.

In the last two decades, a renewed interest in property rights have challenged the accepted interpretation of property rights as “bundle of rights” over the use of things and have rehabilitated the old classical interpretation of property rights as exclusive (absolute) dominium over things rooted in the right to exclude. This paper provides a three-dimensional framework for the study of property rights and shows that, historically, the reason for this dual nature of property rights derives from the fact that properties can either be treated as personal property, or capital. While the classical approach is consistent with the former interpretation, the neoclassical (“bundle of right”) approach is consistent with the latter. By reinterpreting the dual nature of property rights as a dichotomy between capital and personal property the paper links the dual nature of property rights to the dual nature of value: while the classical theory of property rights over personal properties derives from the classical theory of use-value, the neoclassical theory of property rights over capital derives from a theory of property rights linked to exchange-value. The work makes two main contributions to the debates in the legal and economic literature. First, it re-evaluates and justifies the interpretation of property rights as a “politically-embedded” bundle of right provided by legal realist, old progressive and institutional economists at the turn of the twentieth century. Second, it reassesses the conclusions reached by the Coasean legacy in law and economics; the paper shows that transaction costs are necessary and sufficient to explain the emergence and the form of legal institutions only in pure capitalistic societies, but cannot explain the emergence and the nature of legal institutions whenever personal properties are involved. Additional normative assumptions explaining the origin and the legitimacy of value judgments are needed to understand and explain the dual nature of property rights and to make sense of the decisions to employ personal properties as capital (or vice versa). This highlights the often neglected (but decisive) role played by the rationality assumption in legitimizing the normative conclusions reached by Coasean law and economics (and welfare economics more generally). It also highlights that the normative power of transaction costs is always institution-determined (socially-embedded), never institution-determining.

This Article introduces the concept of a property-tax bundle of rights. There i s no property without tax; tax inevitably affects property rights. America has settled into an absolute conception of the property-tax bundle, under which private individuals have absolute power over their property for all time after an initial payment of a flattened wage tax. The project of property, from Blackstone to Coase, has sought alignment of the private and public interests. The absolute conception works well for things. But neither property nor tax theory have checked the unlimited powers granted to the owners of private capital: Money has slipped through the cracks i n our thoughts. This Article traces the evolution of the absolute property-tax bundle through the death of all second taxes on capital and the Rule against Perpetuities. It then contrasts a fiduciary conception of the bundle, which changes tax from a flattened prepaid to a progressive postpaid or spending tax. This removes the right to waste from a property owner’s bundle of rights and thus generalizes an insight credited to Jefferson: The fiduciary conception places all wealth in usufruct for the living. It is a promising idea for a reasonable society in an age of great wealth and great inequality. The fiduciary conception ensures that America’s billionaires will maintain their wealth i n a common pool for the good of all, returning to the alignment of interests sought by liberal theorists at l east since Locke.

"The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of how unequal access to commons is (re)produced and contested. I do so by looking into the thwarted struggle of small-scale fishers in post-war Northern Sri Lanka to contest encroachment of an Indian trawler fleet. I contend that for understanding marginality in the commons we need to make two conceptual shifts in understanding resource access and collective action: one is from access as a bundle of rights to access as a bundle of powers (Ribot and Peluso 2003); and two is from collective action geared at fostering institutions for resource stewardship towards collective action geared at contesting marginalizing access mechanisms. This paper uses this political perspective to explain how Indian trawlers’ superior technology and political agency allow them to illegally operate in Sri Lankan waters, and prevent North Sri Lankan fishers to rebuild a livelihood after decades of war. I subsequently demonstrate that fishers are unable to collectively challenge this status quo due to political repression by the Sri Lankan government, the post-war erosion of fisheries cooperatives, and fishers’ inability to articulate and politicize their Tamil identity. This elusive quest for access and collective action has forced fishers into silent and cynical adaptation to the reality of trawler intrusions. I conclude that struggles for resource access are not only struggles for legitimate property rights, but also about the ability to influence the multiple mechanisms of access through processes of contestatory collective action."

This article analyses the property rights that Chinese peasants have under the present Household Responsibility System (HRS) using Antony M. Honore’s work on ownership, especially his analysis of eleven standard incidents of the full liberal concept of ownership. It confirms Honore’s insight that these standard incidents can be divided among two or more persons, and thus there are different types of property rights which are variants and alternatives to the liberal type of property rights. This article also confirms that the Chinese land system is a real alternative to the full liberal concept of ownership. The current Chinese land system is alleged to be “unclear and insecure” because it is not the kind of private ownership that neoliberals champion. In the tradition of the “bundle of rights” theory, it is helpful to use Honore’s concept of ownership, rather than Harold Demsetz’s type of property rights, to understand the current Chinese system.

This paper offers insight on the missed narrative of land and resource conflict beneath the reality of gemstones and ores in the inchoate industry of limestone, marble and gold mining by communities in Karamoja – Uganda. Land tenure is often overlooked as a cause of tension or driver of conflicts especially in the design of responses to conflict situations in mining areas. Land tenure is considered to be an intricate, historical and perplexing factor in conflict, and the response to its manifestation is often limited to the formalization of land rights. This paper describes the forms of land tenure induced conflicts in mining communities. It articulates the need to address such land-resource conflicts by applying responses based on property rights recognition to that capture the full bundle of rights especially on customary land and improve the leverage of communities in claiming benefits from mining actions. The paper is arranged in six sections; a short introduction, background, and methods, women in mining, description of conflicts due to land-resource tenure and property rights recognition as a response to conflict. It concludes that property rights are essential in supporting claims to entitlement and benefits for communities, as they improve the bargaining power of communities while avoiding the coalescing ability of land grievances in driving mining communities into conflict. Under customary-communal tenure, surface rights are well defined but rarely are sub-surface rights. Legal and formal instruments to guarantee economic value and costs, transmitted in compensation payments, royalty fees and in benefits to communities are necessary to lessen the frictions about quantifications and measures.

This paper discusses how to use blockchain tokens to represent real estate titles. Tokens on the blockchain as a technological concept is the closest solution to the legal concept of titles, because it provides for evidence of ownership and can be transferred from one address to another, while giving exclusive access to such an address to the owner. This paper contains the analysis of the concept of tokens in the context of its applicability to title rights on real estate. There is also a discussion of the outcomes of conducted interviews with professionals in the field of Computer Science, technologies, blockchain and smart contracts. Some critical mismatches were found: tokens are not able to satisfy current demand to manage title rights online. To develop a mature and sustainable electronic system, there are certain issues that need to be addressed: inheritance procedures, litigation, guardianship, delegation of rights and rights of third parties (liens and encumbrances) as well as the legal concept of bundle of rights (possession, disposition, enjoyment, etc.), which requires a strong mathematical model. During the abovementioned interviews, some weaknesses were found in the existing ideas of the use of the blockchain for real estate, mostly related to the undesirable centralization and issues with security. As the result of this research, it is obvious what needs to be developed is the concept of a high-level design of the technology, capable of managing title rights on the blockchain, which includes a three-level mechanism of (1) e-voting, which provides for a democratic implementation of governing algorithms; (2) Smart Laws, as the concept of high level “smart” algorithms that implement (by e-voting) existing laws related to property rights in a form of the program/protocol; and (3) smart contract templates which are based on the smart laws, that allow people to manage their title rights online.

This paper outlines key applications of property rights theory from the standpoint of ‘entangled political economy,’ which conceptualises economic and political agents interacting within society. The entangled political economy framework stresses that property rights denote relationships between societal members, and that property rights are the subject of evolutionary change. The nature and role of property rights in an entangled political economy reinforces the ‘bundle of rights’ perspective, challenging notions of property rights that emphasise the primacy of ownership. Far from necessarily imperilling the integrity of a market-based economic order, the bundle orientation inherent in entangled political economy can accommodate extensive market activities grounded in robust property right protections.

Women's ownership, use, and control over property matter for their well-being and agency and can influence outcomes for the second generation -- women's daughters and sons. Additionally, gender gaps in property ownership induce allocative inefficiencies and foregone economic output, thus having economywide implications. This paper uses data for 28 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to shine a spotlight on gaps between men and women in land and housing (property) ownership and analyze patterns across and within countries. The results indicate that men are about three times as likely as women to claim sole ownership over property. Gender gaps are smaller if joint ownership is taken into consideration, but still materially disadvantage women. Men are significantly more likely to own property than women even after controlling for a host of other factors. This paper is an important step toward a better understanding of gender gaps in property ownership in Africa and outlines an agenda for future data collection and analytic efforts.

There is a strong consensus that secure property rights are critical for economic development, but tricky issues about the direction of causation and measurement have made it difficult to demonstrate this relationship empirically. In recent years, scholars have made progress on these issues. In the future, scholars can profitably turn their attention to four issues: (i) why privatization is so unpopular, (ii) how politics shapes property rights, (iii) the distributional consequences of property rights, and (iv) the impact of violence on property rights and economic development. Keywords: property rights; institutions; violence; transaction costs

Les races animales sont des ressources intangibles créées et maintenues par des activités de sélection visant un «progrès génétique» et continuellement transformées du fait de ces activités et des pratiques d’élevage. Les races animales (du moins pour les bovins et les ovins) ont un statut de propriété commune.La façon dont ces ressources communes sont gérées, et dont le progrès génétique est généré, contrôlé et distribué, repose dans différents contextes nationaux et historiques sur des «régimes de sélection», constitués de règles, de dispositifs politiques, scientifiques, techniques et informationnels. Le cadre d’analyse des faisceaux de droits de propriété (ou droits d’entreprendre telle ou telle action concernant la ressource) proposé par Schlager et Ostrom (1992) est mis en œuvre pour distinguer ces régimes, en considérant d’abord celui qui se structure en France dans les années 1960 avec l’appui de la politique nationale de modernisation agricole, puis celui qui aujourd’hui résulte des évolutions récentes sur le plan scientifique et technique, dans un contexte de libéralisation des politiques agricoles. Chacun de ces régimes a pris forme dans le contexte de ruptures technologiques: l’insémination artificielle pour le premier et la génomique pour le second. Nous analysons la complexité des systèmes de ressources communes dans notre cas d’application, les activités de sélection des animaux d’élevage, et l’évolution des régimes de droits de propriété dans le cas des ressources génétiques animales. Nous avons introduit pour notre analyse un droit de contribution qui concerne la définition des critères de sélection visant un changement de l’orientation de la race (conduisant ainsi à une «altération» de la race). Tandis qu’un organisme de sélection unique par race avait le monopole de ce droit, celui-ci est remis en cause par le régime plus concurrentiel qui émerge à chacune des deux périodes les enjeux économiques sont différents.

In a society where individuals compete for the use of scarce resources, some rules or criteria of competition must exist to resolve the conflict. These rules, known as property rights, may be established in law, in regulation, in custom or in hierarchy ranking. The structures of rights may take a variety of forms, ranging from private property rights at one extreme to common property rights at the other. Most fall somewhere in between: either set of rights would be rare in its purest form.

This article makes two suggestions for ongoing debates about property concepts. First, these debates have focused too much on concepts for ownership; they have neglected concepts that cover property rights weaker than rights of ownership but still robust enough to constitute rights in relation to ownable resources. Second, these same debates have neglected the roles that artifact functions might play in property concepts. Property rights are artifacts, and functions play crucial roles in artifacts and the concepts that represent them. The Article confirms both suggestions via a close study of one particular property concept. That concept is prominent in Anglo-American property common law. In that concept’s focal sense, a property right refers to: an immunized and in rem claim-right; given institutional status in law and social morality; in relation to a separable resource; to facilitate the beneficial use of that resource and other resources commonly proximate to it. This concept gets its structure from a function, the imperative that property rights be structured to serve different people’s correlative interests in using resources for rational well-being. This concept explains why the field of property rights covers not only rights of sole ownership but also nonpossessory rights and rights in concurrent estates. To illustrate, the Article studies: legal interests in tenancies in common; easements; revocable licenses; mortgages; covenants running with the land; riparian rights; and appropriative rights and appurtenant ditch easements.

When writing about property and property rights in his imagined post-capitalist society of the future, Marx seemed to envisage ‘individual property’ co-existing with ‘socialized property’ in the means of production. As the social and political consequences of faltering growth and increasing inequality, debt and insecurity gradually manifest themselves, and with automation and artificial intelligence lurking in the wings, the future of capitalism, at least in its current form, looks increasingly uncertain. With this, the question of what property and property rights might look like in the future, in a potentially post-capitalist society, is becoming ever more pertinent. Is the choice simply between private property and markets, and public (state-owned) property and planning? Or can individual and social property in the (same) means of production co-exist, as Marx suggested? This paper explores ways in which they might, through an examination of the Chinese household responsibility system (HRS) and the ‘fuzzy’ and seemingly confusing regime of land ownership that it instituted. It examines the HRS against the backdrop of Marx’s ideas about property and subsequent (post-Marx) theorizing about the legal nature of property in which property has come widely to be conceptualized not as a single, unitary ‘ownership’ right to a thing (or, indeed, as the thing itself) but as a ‘bundle of rights’. The bundle-of-rights idea of property, it suggests, enables us to see not only that ‘individual’ and ‘socialized’ property’ in the (same) means of production might indeed co-exist, but that the range of institutional possibility is far greater than that between capitalism and socialism/communism as traditionally conceived.

We develop and discuss a new institutional concept, “the tragedy of the uncommons,” to describe the inefficient use of resources that are both non-substitutable and transitory. This situation is not captured by the tragedy of the commons/anti-commons literature or other theories. We highlight the crucial and under-appreciated assumptions about value over time of the tragedy of the commons and anticommons. We also introduce the concepts of “under” and “over-ownership” to the bundle of rights theory of property clarifying weaknesses in the literature to help better understand how institutions can yield efficient resource preservation.

Although property rights have been linked to a variety of positive social outcomes at the macro-level, less research focuses on how property rights affect the benefits that actors receive at the micro-level. This article examines property rights to a common-pool resource (CPR) that are asymmetrically allocated among users, and presents a theoretical argument that property rights affect the allocation of resource benefits in two important ways. First, users with extensive property rights receive more benefits than users with limited property rights. Second, users with the power to influence how community rules are enforced—for example, landholders and ethnic majorities—more effectively define and defend their property and thus receive disproportionate CPR benefits compared to users with similar levels of property rights, but with less power. Using household-level survey data in Bolivia, Kenya, Mexico, and Uganda, collected after a period of property rights decentralization, the empirical analysis finds support for these propositions. We conclude that power critically moderates the effects of property rights on the commons.

The governance of water is of increasing concern to policy makers. Several property rights systems, which allow for control of water by the individual, community, or state have been advocated, but no approach has been uniformly successful in resolving problems arising from competing uses. Recently, in an attempt to resolve challenges experienced under state control, a number of judicial rulings and statutes have used the ‘Rights of Nature’ approach to grant rivers legal rights around the world. Here we put forward the proposition that granting legal rights to rivers can be viewed as creating a new property rights system that we term resource self-determination. We test this model of resource self-determination against two cases where rivers have been granted legal rights in New Zealand and India to explicate how resource self-determination has been defined in each case. Although we find that the New Zealand decision results in a more clearly defined property rights system than occurs in India, in neither context are the new bundle of rights complete. We conclude that in the cases examined, unless the definitional shortfalls are addressed, granting legal rights to rivers is unlikely to resolve the long-standing competing use problems affecting these rivers.

Many new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are currently being added to the internet’s domain name system. It is, therefore, important to ask how we should conceptualize the legal aspects of this expansion. This article focuses on the legal position acquired by a successful applicant for a new gTLD. It examines several possible concepts and proposes a ‘gTLD right’ as a potential new addition to our conceptual framework. This is intended to denote the contractually based bundle of rights in a gTLD string. The proposal is based on the finding that several other relevant concepts do not adequately describe the legal position of a successful gTLD applicant. In particular, it is difficult to claim that the applicant acquires a property right in the gTLD string. Moreover, while it is technically adequate to say that the gTLD is ‘delegated into the internet root’, the legal concept of ‘delegation’ does not adequately capture the contractual foundation of this bundle of rights.

Copyright is an important part of marketplace framework policies that support creative industries. Copyright is also increasingly relevant to broader economic and industrial policy. Market-oriented justifications for copyright, therefore, factor heavily in debates about copyright law and policy reform. In this context, discourse often revolves around copyright as a property right, which underpins market transactions. This chapter endorses market-oriented approaches towards copyright as a means to promote creators’ interests, consumers’ interests, and the public interest. The conception of copyright as a property right is consistent with the basis of general policymaking in free market economies. Two caveats are, however, important to understand how proprietary rights for creators can and do promote the public interest. First, like all property rights, copyrights are not absolute but appropriately limited by other individual rights and social values. Second, in order to function effectively, copyright entitlements should be structured to facilitate, not frustrate, free market transactions. This chapter explains why and how copyright’s currently layered and fragmented bundles of rights inhibit the public interest in developing efficient copyright markets. An appropriately limited and structurally simplified bundle of rights, as suggested in this chapter, would increase the efficiency of copyright markets and grow the size of creative industries. More efficient markets will lead to more choices and lower prices for consumers, as well as increased economic opportunities for creators to reach a larger market. However, such market-oriented approaches may also concentrate power, increase inequality, and marginalise individual creators. This chapter mentions three practical mechanisms to address such concerns: collective bargaining to achieve fairer contracting in creative industries; class action litigation to enforce common rights of individual creators; and certified branding schemes to promote fair trade and equitable consumption of creative content. The purpose of presenting such mechanisms in this chapter is not to exhaustively debate their merits or resolve doctrinal implementation issues. Rather, these mechanisms merely illustrate the range of options available to mitigate certain adverse impacts that a market-oriented copyright policy might have. This chapter focuses on examples from Canada that other countries, or the international policymaking community, may find informative. Importantly, regulatory policy mechanisms to achieve fairer market transactions need not be embedded directly into copyright statutes or the common law. Copyright should not be expected to shoulder the entire load of protecting the public interest in creative industries. It can and should be assessed and reformed as part of a broader package of marketplace framework policies. With better integrated framework policies both protecting and regulating copyright, markets can work better for creators, consumers, and the public interest.

SUMMARYConservation easements (or conservation covenants) are commonly conceptualized as acquisitions of sticks in a ‘bundle of rights’ and are increasingly implemented for wildlife conservation on private lands. This research asks: (1) What are the possibilities and limitations of the conservation easement approach to wildlife conservation in contrasting rural and periurban regions? and (2) How does analysis of conservation easements differ when examining property as a bundle of rights or alternative metaphors? These questions were addressed through document analysis, interviews and GIS mapping in two regions where The Nature Conservancy deployed conservation easements for wildlife habitat: rural Lassen Foothills and periurban Tenaja Corridor, USA. Splitting the bundle allowed for site and region-specific easements with differences in permitted housing densities, land management and hunting. Easements focused on restricted rights rather than affirmative duties. The challenges of habitat connectivity in the fragmented Tenaja Corridor revealed the limits of parcel-based acquisition. Analysts and conservation practitioners should rethink the bundle of rights concept of property, considering a bundle of duties, powers and owners within a broader web of social and ecological interests, to understand the role of conservation acquisitions in contrasting landscape contexts.

Decentralizing property rights from state control to user communities has encouraged people’s participation in forest management. Relatively few studies, however, examine the forest regulations required for exercising such property rights. To address this issue, Schlager and Ostrom’s ‘bundle of rights’ framework was used to examine various forms of property rights and regulations in three systems of community-based forest management. The field research was undertaken in the northern Philippines, using eight cases of community-based forest management at sites in the provinces of Nueva Vizcaya and Ifugao. Local communities were found to informally retain the authority to create locally crafted property rights and regulations in a central government-initiated program. While forest regulations and practices prescribed at the national level have improved forest conditions, the flow of forest benefits to communities has been limited because of decentralization without devolution of authority. A case study of a site initiated by a local government indicated that the transfer of responsibility from the central government to local government units can create more favourable conditions for the flow of forest benefits to communities. But due to a lack of clarity about devolution of cutting permits and about the locations of afforested critical watershed areas, authorized local users lose their authorization. When forest is managed traditionally, communities can have more assured rights than in government-initiated programs, particularly in relation to tree ownership. This is because individuals have the authority to devise collective-choice rights as well as operational rights.

This paper discusses the concept of "property" rights in an interdisciplinary perspective (Law and Economics) in order to compose an analytical conceptual framework to issues related to appropriability involved in public goods (PG) and common pool resources (CPR) analysis. Firstly, we discuss the differences between legal and economic concepts of property rights, trying to integrate economic and legal analytical elements: a right is an opportunity for current or future uses of an asset that is guaranteed by legal system (an enforceable power to maintain the control over economic opportunities). Although economists may not be concerned if some opportunity is guaranteed (or not) by law, nor whether its entitlement is made by means of property or by some other kind of right, these differences also matter for economic analysis. To deal with this question, we need to open the "black box" of the so called "property" rights: a) identifying and analyzing the different ways in which rights are entitled - from a legal perspective (Hohfeld) and in the footsteps of studies analyzing the economic relevance of the differences between property and possession, or property, liability and inalienability (Calabresi and Melamed); b) breaking down the concept of property rights in many faculties and analyzing them as a bundle of rights (Schlager and Ostrom). By way of conclusion, we discuss the possibilities of integrating these approaches and explore some of the implications of the study. From a public policies perspective, a more detailed understanding may assist in policy formulation (e.g., to break down and assign specific rights to different holders, etc.), and designing new forms of entitlements, or even the creation of new "assets" that could become the subject of rights. Resumo Este trabalho discute o conceito de direitos de "propriedade" numa perspectiva interdisciplinar (direito e economia), de modo a compor um quadro conceitual para análise de questões relacionadas à apropriabilidade relacionadas a bens públicos e common pool resources. Primeiramente, discutem-se as diferenças entre os conceitos jurídico e econômico de propriedade, buscando-se integrar os elementos analíticos das duas disciplinas: um direito é uma oportunidade de uso - atual ou futuro - de um ativo garantida pelo sistema jurídico (uma forma de manter o controle sobre oportunidades econômicas). Embora os economistas não se preocupem em saber se uma oportunidade é ou não garantida pelo sistema jurídico, tampouco se a garantia se faz por meio de propriedade ou outros tipos de proteção legal, tais diferenças importam para a análise econômica. Para tratar dessa questão, é necessário abrir a "caixa preta" dos assim chamados direitos de "propriedade", (a) identificando as diferentes formas de atribuição de direitos; (b) destrinchando o conceito de direitos de propriedade em várias faculdades e analisando-as como feixe de direitos. A guisa de conclusão, discutem-se as possibilidades de integrar as diferentes abordagens apresentadas ao longo do trabalho, e se exploram algumas implicações para políticas públicas.

Competition between agricultural operations, urban transplants, and ecological interests is changing the nature of property rights and land use in rural Ontario. In a region with valuable ecosystems and climate, soil, and location traditionally well-suited for crop and livestock production, plot sizes are decreasing as land is subdivided and allocated to non-agricultural residential use. Although this practice can increase property value for farmers, Michael Heller’s spatial anticommons may also be observed, such that “each owner receives a core bundle of rights, but in too small a space for the most efficient use” [2]. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new application of Heller’s anticommons theory, examining how the increasingly patchwork-like distribution of rural land parcels can be expected to affect farm and ecosystem productivity. Ultimately, deadweight loss occurs because neither agricultural nor ecological economies of scale can be recognized on plots that are too small for efficient use. Using rural planning reports and habitat ecology studies, trends in the fragmentation process are described and compared to the aims of provincial land-use policy, including the Provincial Policy Statement, the Greenbelt Act, and the Places to Grow Act. While the goals of farmers and conservationists may at times seem discrete or incompatible, the anticommons framework may be used to identify shared challenges. Thus the two parties might consider how collective action could be used to overcome the difficulties of reuniting subdivided tracts of land.

The prevailing image in the economic and legal literature portrays property rights as "a bundle of rights" and emphasizes their exclusivity, autonomy, and stability. Building on Zhou (2005), we elaborate and illustrate an alternative theoretical model to conceptualize property rights as a relational concept. We argue that the formation and evolution of property rights reflect ongoing social relations between an organization and its key stakeholders within and outside its boundaries. The proposed conceptualization emphasizes property rights as relational, interdependent, and adaptive, reflecting stable patterns of interactions between the organization and its environments. In this sense, property rights are a bundle of social relations. This line of arguments is illustrated in an empirical analysis of the configuration of property rights and their roles in the acquisition of financial resources among small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China.