| How to manage effectively natural resources on earth has been a major concern of social scientists and policy makers. A dominant approach towards the management of natural resources takes for granted that a common property regime will eventually lead to resource degradation or even destruction. Proceeding from this approach, some scholars represented by Garrett Hardin (1968) maintain that natural resources can be effectively managed only under a private property regime or a state property regime.;Predicated on a critique of this approach, this research has addressed two major theoretical issues: (1) whether resource users can be cooperative for collective benefits when they jointly use a natural resource and (2) whether natural resources can be effectively managed under a common property regime. The primary argument I have made on the two issues is that a common property regime possesses three principal sets of attributes: owning common properties, having corporate groups of resource users, and enforcing a set of institutional rules. If these attributes, or what I call the three complementary common property management principles, are well maintained, they can motivate resource users to take collective action, and thus lead to successful common property management.;To seek evidence in support of this argument, I have made a comparative study of four empirical cases of farmer-managed irrigation systems in Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United States, from which substantial evidence has been found of the existence of the three principal sets of attributes of a common property regime. Based on the evidence found from the case studies, I conclude that the three common property management principles provide the resource users of the irrigation systems with three major sources of incentive to take collective action; common-pool resources such as irrigation water can be effectively managed under common property regimes; a common property regime itself will not lead to resource misuse; and there is no need, as Hardin and others have claimed, to change common property into either state property or private property to achieve the goal of an effective management of common-pool resources. |
