Multifunctional land use has become a widely supported pathway for Europe's countryside. Brussels and the national governments stimulate farmers to integrate primary production with non-agricultural practices from which they can also benefit. In favour of this development different stakeholders are encouraged to collaborate to produce the so-called farmer-managed public goods. This paper explores critical success factors for the production and maintenance of these public goods.

This paper revisits the water deeds approach first proposed by Vernon Smith to construct an agent level dynamic optimization model using a simple discrete time framework. First a model of groundwater exploitation for a depletable aquifer is examined. Next an agent level model is solved allowing the agent to trade in the stock of water available at any point in time.

According to property rights theory, national plant genetic resources (PGRs) are sovereign properties rather than resources belonging to the common heritage of humankind. Consequently, provider states can claim compensation from users of their national PGRs, leading to the need for bilateral or multilateral agreements to share national PGRs' commercial benefits. However, as benefit-sharing agreements are made exante, estimating the potential profit is difficult. Thus, issues around asymmetric information about the commercial value of such resources have emerged.

Property rights over natural resources became a distinct area of inquiry in environmental economics and policy in the last decades, but their role has not yet been investigated thoroughly. Transition countries represent an excellent material of analysis of various policies and institutional developments concerning the regime of use and management of natural resources. The processes of societal transformation had deep impacts on the forestry sector, entailing land reforms and subsequent changes to its institutional and organisational framework.

Property regimes shape the social relations, in particular, social settings, and represent an important element for external intervention and sustainable rural development. The introduction recalls common aspects and specific conceptualisations of property analysis in the field of economics, sociology and social anthropology and summarises main academic discourses about property rights in order to develop a differentiated understanding of property. In Section 1, general trends in property relations characterising modern rural societies are outlined.

The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate past forest management policies and property rights regimes in achieving sustainability of the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest (SMF) in Bangladesh. The adequacy of forest policies to reflect regimes of property rights in their design and implementation is examined using content analysis. The analysis synthesises forest policies of four distinct historical time periods, and the embedding of property rights during those periods using Schlager and Ostrom's typology.

This paper illustrates the clash between interests and ideas concerning property rights and regulation by analyzing the ongoing debate on the right of public access in Sweden, which has recently intensified due to an influx of foreign professional berry harvesters. The conflicts in Sweden are found to stem from contradictory concepts concerning property (notably, ownership and the right of public access) and ideological differences in terms of whether forest resources should be regulated by government or governance.

In recent years, growing economic globalisation has been accompanied by rising social support for market systems as a means of managing resource-use. In turn, the free market movement considers definite and secure property rights (especially private rights and, sometimes, communal rights) in resources to be the necessary basis for a desirable market system. Global policies for managing the Earth’s genetic resources have been influenced by this approach.

Increased participation of local users in decision-making about forests and gaining benefits from these forests are major goals of the community forestry program in Nepal. However, there is a lack of real participation in community forest governance amongst users, particularly by poor and marginalised members. By employing a mixed-method approach, this research explores the issue of participation in the governance of community forests, and in particular the role of incentives in increasing participation.

This study examines the relationship between property rights, defined by land tenure security and the strength of local-level institutions, and household's preferences for fuelwood source. A multinomial regression model applied to survey data collected in rural Ethiopia underpins the analysis. Results from the discrete choice model indicate that active local-level institutions increase household dependency on open access forests, while land security reduces open access forest dependence.