Property Rights & Attitudes Toward Environmental Regulation: An Empirical Investigation

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherie Metcalf
Author(s):  
Christopher P. Rodgers

This chapter examines the impact of property rights on environmental regulation. It first considers a range of property paradigms and how they relate to environmental law, including entitlements-based models of property and resource allocation models of property, before turning to ‘public’ and ‘private’ conceptions of property. It takes note of the fact that environmental protection is a ‘public’ or communal interest, but assimilating public interest objectives into systems of property law based on notions of private right has been problematic, especially for Western systems. The chapter also analyses the interactions between ‘public’ interest and ‘private’ property rights; the role of customary law and cultural norms in the organization of property holding and resource use, using the Maori case as example; and how property structures foster environmental stewardship.


Author(s):  
Karl Widerquist ◽  
Grant S. McCall

This chapter argues that “the Hobbesian hypothesis” (the claim that the Lockean proviso is fulfilled: everyone is better off in a state society with a private property system than they could reasonably expect to be in any society without either of those institutions) plays a large role in contemporary justifications of the state and/or the property rights system. The search turns up few attempts to justify existing states or property rights systems without some version of the hypothesis. Theorists asserting it as an obvious truth in need of little or no supporting evidence include David Gauthier, Jean Hampton, James Buchanan, Gregory S. Kavka, George Klosko, Dudley Knowles, Christopher Heath Wellman, Robert Nozick, Jan Narveson, and many others. Critics include Alan Ryan, Carole Pateman, Charles Mills, Patricia Williams, and others. Yet all this disagreement has produce very little debate or interest in an empirical investigation of the hypothesis.


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