MARKET OR COMMUNITY FAILURE - CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON COMMON PROPERTY RESEARCH

The best known revisionist perspective on the so-called ''tragedy of t he 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 a nd weaknesses thereby, we discuss a ''thicker'' or more ethnographic p erspective that emphasizes the importance of specifying property right s and their embeddedness within discrete and changing historical momen ts, social and political relations. We argue that this perspective lea ds to a focus on ''community failure'' rather than ''market failure'' as the presumed cause of environmental problems, and hence, to questio ns about how markets, states, and other external and internal factors affect the capacities of communities and user-groups to respond adequa tely to environmental change.