Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Can the COMMONS prevent rural migration ?

Common property has a unique advantage of possessing the incentives inherent in group use while at the same type imposing control over accessibility, thus preserving the commons for the common man. Considering that the degradation of natural resources causes decline in income in rural areas leading to migration and subsequent hardships, it seems logical to develop rigorous common property resource management to prevent such tragedy. However steps must be taken to ensure that the common property rights are egalitarian or at the least the benefit derived from it exceeds the cost of maintaining it for all shareholders.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not degradation of natural resources, but the absence of resources in form of private property is one the major reasons of distressed induced migration. The common resources at disposal in villages vary, mostly they are insufficient to provide for all the poor families who might be vulnerable to migartion in the village.
If all the resources public, private, open access et al. are pooled and governed as commons, may be the problem and many other problems can be solved.

Utsav Mishra said...
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Utsav Mishra said...

It's a good point put up by you. The main reason of migration is lack of livelihood options in the villages.Government related schemes have always existed in our villages to improve the conditions but they could not do so. So, commons can do this by ensuring equal rights to all by giving the responsibility of managing the resource to some or all of the stakeholders.

Nilamadhab said...

I appreciate the idea. In some places through proper natural resource management and appropriate policy formulation the problem of migration can be controlled. But how the problem could be addressed in places where the migrating population is large enough to get adequate return from the common property resources! In these places where there is paucity of common resources, management of the labor to extract benefit from the exploration of new avenues of livelihood may form a better alternative to tackle the menace of migration. However,the common resources, in this holistic approach can be utilized as one among the means to achieve the goal.