This is a multi-disciplinary volume of papers on the issue of common property resources such as forests, fisheries, the atmosphere, rivers, and oceans, ownership of which is common or shared. Management of these resources is especially complex if ownership is shared between nations. The contributors include distinguished economists, demographers, lawyers, and scientists.

It is now more than fifty years since the United Nations system and the Bretton Woods institutions were created. The world has changed since then, and so have its governance needs in terms of institutions and rules. It is time to think about the contours of institutions and governance that would meet the needs of the world economy, and also polity, at least for the first quarter of the twenty-first century. This book is the first to examine the subject in depth.

Two and a half billion people are affected directly on a day-to-day basis by the allocation and use of purely local resources. Yet "official" development economics has concentrated on headline international issues and only recently begun to take account of the dependence of poor countries on their natural resources, the link between acute poverty and environmental degradation, and the problems associated with the management of local common property such as soil and soil cover, water, forests and their products, animals and fisheries.
In this volume, part of the WIDER Program on the...