Common property protected areas

Garret Hardin’s famous article published in 1968 entitled The Tragedy of the Commons triggered a heated debate over the capacity of local communities, leading to the development of a new field of research on how shared resources could be depleted, and how collective action could prevent it. This research, however, has not yet been applied fully to broader conservation policy. Protected areas have a particularly close relationship to property rights, to which the knowledge on common property could contribute to a higher degree. This research aims to integrate them better by proposing a hybrid concept – the common property protected area (CPPA). It identifies different characteristics between the two bodies of literature in governance structures, objects of management, values and uses, and stakeholder relationships. Then, this thesis conceptualizes CPPA as a bounded area of land and/or water under legal or other effective common property governance, and managed for both nature conservation and well-being of local people. The empirical part of the research looks at Costa Rica as a country-level case study with emphasis on policies and examples of forest conservation by government and non-governmental sectors, followed by two site-specific case studies in Costa Rica. One site was a forest reserve owned and managed by a local community for local well-being and conservation values. This case was selected as an example of a CPPA. The other was a forest reserve belonging to an individual owner, which allowed for a comparison with a CPPA. This research identified key preconditions and promoting factors for grassroots institutions aimed at combining nature conservation and local people’s well-being, roughly grouped in four categories: physical and environmental characteristics; social capacity; property rights and roles of various stakeholders; and driving forces. Several preconditions were identified in the studied cases, including clear boundaries, normative values favoring conservation, the well-being of core property owners, and flexibility in the bundles of property rights held by stakeholders.