Participatory institutions: The context of common and private property resources

Participation is the initiation and continuance of an active process by which beneficiary groups influence the direction and execution of development activity. In the context of resource management participatory institutions often present an alternative when the market and/or the state fail to maintain resource stocks at desirable levels. This paper presents two case-studies of the emergence of participatory institutions and builds up analytical models that explain the process of their evolution in an inter-temporal framework. It is shown that the evolution, sustenance and replication of participation and its impact on levels of resource conservation depends on (a) the nature of the links between common and private property resources, (b) the possibility of taking advantage of scale economies, and finally (c) the distributional rules and arrangements. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991