ANTI-COMMONS IN THE AQUACULTURE SECTOR IN PORTUGAL: ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND BUREAUCRACY

Abstract

Last decades of the 20th century have shown many problems arisen from the
emergence of commons mismanagement and under-defined property rights (The
“Tragedy of the Commons”, cf. Hardin, 1968), affecting, especially, the design of
environmental and natural resources management policy.
In the 80s, Michelman introduced another problem, 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”. These problems include the under-use of
resources and may come from several sources, including bureaucracy.
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 anti-commons
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.
When an entrepreneur seeks to invest in a project and his action is inhibited by
the necessity of getting permits from several national and regional agencies, each
one holding exclusion rights to the project, we may face the “Tragedy of the
Anticommons”. In this context, the possible emergence of a situation of anticommons
can create a lot of problems in the development of local initiatives of
entrepreneurship, affecting the potential of innovation and of regional development. 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 anti-commons
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.
When an entrepreneur seeks to invest in a project and his action is inhibited by
the necessity of getting permits from several national and regional agencies, each
one holding exclusion rights to the project, we may face the “Tragedy of the
Anticommons”. In this context, the possible emergence of a situation of anticommons
can create a lot of problems in the development of local initiatives of
entrepreneurship, affecting the potential of innovation and of regional development.