Market or Community Failure? Critical Perspectives on Common Property Research

The best known revisionist perspective on the so-called tragedy of the commons underscores important conceptual and hence policy errors and has been important in contributing to understanding of conditions in which collective action for common benefits, with respect to common pool resources, can take place. Characterizing this perspective as a thin or abstract, generalizing explanatory model, with strengths and weaknesses thereby, we discuss a thicker or more ethnographic perspective that emphasizes the importance of specifying property rights and their embeddedness within discrete and changing historical moments, social and political relations. We argue that this perspective leads to a focus on community failure rather than market failure as the presumed cause of environmental problems, and hence, to questions about how markets, states, and other external and internal factors affect the capacities of communities and user-groups to respond adequately to environmental change.