Property rights are in the core of the problem of natural resources management. Last decades of the 20th century have shown many problems arisen from the emergence of commons mismanagement and underdefined property rights (The “Tragedy of the Commons”). In the 80s, Michelman introduced another issue, this time about the excessive fragmentation of property rights. A new concept, “anticommons”, was developed to put in evidence some problems one can see as the mirror image of traditional “Tragedy of the commons”. Michelman introduced the concept of “anticommons” to explain “a type of property in which everyone always has rights respecting the objects in the regime, and no one, consequently, is ever privileged to use any of them except as particularly authorized by others”. In this sense, “anticommons” is seen as a property regime in which multiple owners hold effective rights of exclusion in a scarce resource. The problem stands in this: coexistence of multiple exclusion rights creates conditions for suboptimal use of the common resource. Buchanan and Yoon (2000) suggested a special view of this problem. The authors stated that the anticommons construction offers an analytical tool for isolating a central feature of “sometimes disparate institutional structures”. This means that the inefficiencies introduced by overlapping and intrusive regulatory bureaucracies may be studied with the help of this conceptualization. There are only a few empirical studies on anticommons tragedies in the real world, most of them focusing on pharmaceutics industry. The main purpose of the paper is to use this conceptualization to study the design and execution of aquaculture policy in Portugal and to introduce the possible emergence of an “anti?commons tragedy” when we approach the difficult process of approval and execution of projects of aquaculture in the Portuguese coastal areas. To study this problem, we use the results of the evaluation process of the Operational Fisheries Program, funded by European Union and we introduce a new form of simultaneous project evaluation in the so?called PINs (especially interesting Projects). Our results are consistent with the suggestion of Buchanan and Yoon (2000).

--

Aquaculture, Anti?commons, Bureaucracy

This talk is associated with the following record:

• AQUACULTURE DEVELOPMENT: “ANTICOMMONS TRAGEDIES” AND “PIN” PROCEDURES