Pranay Ranjan

Property rights in natural resources and how they affect cooperation and collective action toward sustainable management of natural resources has been a key thread of scholarly inquiry for decades. However, a key knowledge gap is a comparison of different conceptual or theoretical approaches to the analysis of property rights. To fill this knowledge gap, we compare and contrast economic and legal pluralistic approaches to property rights to present a comparative review of studies on water rights in drainage and irrigation systems. In particular, we review studies on water rights in relation to managing agricultural drainage systems in the Western Lake Erie Basin (WLEB) region of Ohio, United States and water rights in relation to the warabandi irrigation system prevalent in North–West India. Our comparative review demonstrates that economic approaches to the analysis of property rights recognize the role of incentives in motivating or hindering collective action behaviors pertaining to natural resource management. In contrast, legal pluralistic approaches to property rights recognize their different bases of legitimacy. Overall, we find that whereas economic approaches focus on the relationship between property rights structures, incentives, behaviors and outcomes, legal pluralistic approaches focus on the co‐existence of different systems of property rights with different bases of legitimacy and their relationship with each other. We conclude our review by presenting the implications of our findings for research and practice, including how our findings contribute to the theorization of collective action. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Rights to Water Human Water > Water Governance

Promoting conservation on rented farmland is a challenge for stakeholders working with non-operating landowners (NOLs) and tenant farmers (operators). We conducted an online survey to identify stakeholders who engage with NOLs, and understand how their positioning as ‘intermediaries’ could be leveraged to help bridge the NOL-operator communication gap. A majority of identified stakeholders/intermediaries worked in government agencies, university extension, law firms, or farm management companies. Intermediaries believed that NOLs trusted them for several conservation activities, however, they believed that NOLs were more influenced by operators than by intermediaries. The message that engaging in conservation can help preserve the farm for future generation was perceived to be influential in motivating NOLs. Our findings suggest the need for a holistic approach to engage NOLs by accounting for trust in and influence of intermediaries and operators, and the salience of conservation messages and messaging when promoting conservation behaviors on rented farmlands.

Peri-urban spaces are experiencing tremendous growth in the Global South, which in turn has fuelled a suite of environmental and natural resource management challenges, including inequitable access to and conflicts over natural resources, and the existence of institutional lacunae. Against this backdrop, we examine how scholars study collective action institutions around natural resource management in peri-urban spaces, with a regional focus on South Asia, and present its implications for institutional design and development in peri-urban contexts. In order to do so, we use ‘organic institutions’ and ‘pragmatic institutions’– a type of institutional classification grounded in the origin of institutions, as a conceptual entry point. We find that less is known about the role of organic institutions in enabling collective action around natural resource management in peri-urban spaces, even though their understanding is key for efforts at building effective pragmatic institutions. The paper concludes that practitioners working in peri-urban spaces should invest resources into understanding underlying social differences and developing strategies to mobilise social groups, by developing an understanding of organic institutions in peri-urban spaces.

Institutions are critical for collective action around several environmental policy issues. A seldom-studied issue, agricultural drainage, provides a rich setting to examine how institutional mechanisms interact with two variables linked to collective action: group size and heterogeneity. In this study, we examine institutions for establishing and maintaining agricultural drainage systems in the Western Lake Erie Basin region of Ohio. Specifically, we examine whether and how drainage management institutions interact with two variables, group size and heterogeneity in benefits and costs, for solving the public-good dilemmas of agricultural drainage. Data for this study come from a comparative case study design, using semi-structured in-depth interviews, and a landowner survey. Results suggest that the Olson effect for group size is mediated by institution type, and heterogeneity in benefits and costs is mediated by fairness perceptions, in affecting incentives for collective action. We discuss our findings in light of theories of collective action.

Popovici, R., A. G. de L. Moraes, Z. Ma, L. Zanotti, K. A. Cherkauer, A. E. Erwin, K. E. Mazer, E. F. Bocardo Delgado, J. P. Pinto Cáceres, P. Ranjan, and L. S. Prokopy. 2021. How do Indigenous and local knowledge systems respond to climate change? Ecology and Society 26(3):27. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12481-260327