Institutional Arrangements for Natural Resources

World wide, institutional arrangements for natural resources have undergone a major redesign in the last twenty years. Property rights for reserves of oil and minerals have effectively gone over from international firms to the resource countries. For some renewable resources threatened by extinction such as endangered species new property rights have been established. The “High Sea”, the “res nullius” (Hugo Grotius 1601) or a non-property up to now, has different subsets of property titles attached to it such as the 200 mile economic zones, international fishing commissions and schemes for using the minerals of the sea bottom. Environmental scarcity — another aspect of nature’s resources — has forced the industrial nations to introduce major laws regulating the national use of the environment as a receptacle of waste. A series of transfrontier pollution problems like the acid rain in Europe or global issues such as the protection of the ozone layer still have to be solved. Eventually, property rights for the atmosphere or outer space will have to be developed.