A law & economics approach to the study of integrated management regimes of estuaries

In this paper it is proposed to analyse legal regimes for integrated management of estuaries with the help of institutional legal theory and the Schlager & Ostrom framework for types of ownership. Estuaries are highly valued and valuable and therefore need protection. The problem is that they qualify as multiple-use and multiple-user common pool resources. To be able to analyze the legal regimes governing the estuaries, you must be able to take the position of governmental actors and NGO's into account. For this purpose a first attempt has been made in this paper to adapt the Schlager & Ostrom framework to accomodate for these problems. Therefore two new types of ownership are introduced, namely the trustee and the steward.