Common Property Ecological Resources and Village Economies : A Study of Qualitative Dimensions & Valuation

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the common property (CP) institutions and their management systems in the context of rural land and water resources. In this empirical work an attempt is made to examine the traditional CP institutional arrangements and their role in sustaining the local economies. For the local communities, the neighborhood, and the households, CPRs take on a different significance and complexity. Accordingly this paper attempts to quantify the extent of decline in CPRs in terms of quantity, quality and also the extent of commercialization and its impact on CPRs in the study region. Also the paper discusses the complementarities between private property resources and common property resources and the relationship between common property and equality, drawing on the results obtained from the study. Unlike the previous micro-level studies, in this study an effort is made to assess the extent of dependence of households in terms of employment and income in both the agrarian and tribal social communities. Besides, the focus is on the class structure across both land and caste hierarchy as well as the nature and extent of CPR dependence