English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

Forestland reformcalled open access or non-property regime, where there is no owner andthus no rights of use or duties of maintenance. All these different typesof property rights over natural resources create different consequencesfor use and management. Agrawal and Ostrom (2001) identify varioustypes of property regimes most relevant for the use of common poolresources such as forests and water. They show that rights related toaccess, management, exclusion and alienation affect incentive structureand future operational decisions. For any resource, some rules affect dayto-dayuse and consumption, others structure the creation of operationallevel rules, and still others at a higher constitutional level affect collectivechoices.Among the rights holders, there are (a) owners, who have constitutionalrights to alienation, (b) proprietors, who have rights related to withdrawal,management and exclusion (c) claimants, who possess the operationalrights to access and withdrawal plus a collective-choice rights ofmanagement and (d) users, who just have rights to enter and to harvestsome forms of products within the given sets of rules (see Table 6.1).Table 6.1 Bundles of rights associated with positionsType of rights owner proprietor claimant userWithdrawal (right to enter a defined physical X X X Xarea and obtain products of a resource system)Management (right to regulate resource X X Xproducts, internal use patterns and transformthe resource by making improvement )Exclusion (right to determine who will have X Xright of withdrawal and how that right may betransferred)Alienation (right to sell or lease withdrawal, Xmanagement and exclusion rights)Source: Agrawal and Ostrom (2001)In ‘classic’ tenure system models – state property, individual property andcommon property – bundles of use, management and alienation rightsare clearly defined (Meinzen-Dick 2006). Although theory differentiatesthese three types of property regimes, in practice, however, the lines ofdifferentiation are not always clear. It is difficult to see these propertyregimes as separate and self-contained. Many resources are held inoverlapping and sometimes conflicting combinations of these regimes. Thelines between state and communal property are even more obscured. The112