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Published in:
2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Principles and Best Practices for Climate Change Adaptation
Authors : Benjamin K. Sovacool, Björn-Ola Linnér
Published in: The Political Economy of Climate Change Adaptation
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
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One of the central dilemmas in politics, public policy, and economics is that markets “work” only at distributing certain types of goods. They tend to be efficient at distributing private goods such as bicycles or hamburgers — where property rights can be completely defined and protected, where owners can exclude others from access, and where property rights can be transferred or sold1 — but less effective at common pool resources such as fish in the high seas or grasslands for grazing, which require agreed-upon rules or sanctions. Unfettered economic markets are almost always completely ineffective at distributing these common pool resources. Designing workable, viable management of common pool resources is “tremendously difficult,” since in many cases success depends upon creating an “inverse commons” where material scarcity is not a concern and each additional user increases value rather than diminishes it.2