Commons beyond public goods

Abstract

Common pool resources (CPRs) play crucial role in the welfare of rural household. In developing countries like India, CPRs act as development drivers and safety-net providerto Poor People (PP). To overcome ‘Tragedy of Commons’and sustainable conservation of commons, cooperation is needed to conserve CPRs due to its features: non excludability and substractability of the yield. But, community institution (rural households or community) sometimes faces challenges to conserve economicallywhen we consider two additional characteristics of commons such as mobilityand stationary. We have carried out field study on 419 CPR dependent households to examine CPR settings of canal irrigation, community forestry and tank irrigation. We found: types, nature and degree of conflicts differ between stock and mobile resources, users follow stock and mobile resource specific institutional arrangement and conflicts are resolved by adopting resource specific methods. The nature, type and degree of conflictsare different between villages and districts. We also developed categorizations of CPRs helpful to the resources users for understanding and anticipating strategies to confront and solve commons conflicts.