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CONCERTED ACTION: Environmental Valuation in Europe (EVE) |
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Summary of EVE Workshop 5Distribution Issues & Property Rights
Contributions:
Workshop Summary:The fifth EVE workshop on Distribution Issues & Property Rights was a small multidisciplinary meeting, with a focus on legal and economic dimensions of the subject area, but also covering cultural, ethical, current and historical aspects. Bhaskar Vira's paper argued strongly that property rights go beyond dealing with relationships between people and property, and have relevance in social relationships, which are often contested. Property rights can refer to a benefit strength which has been legitimised by society. The question of legal enforcement of property rights was also addressed, and the argument put forward that the existing liability rules may be unable to provide sufficient legal protection against environmental damage. Also noted was the lack of clear distinction between physical property rights (PPR) and intellectual property rights (IPR). Several aspects were identified by Vira as having implication for environmental valuation:
Phillipe Cullet presented a typology of property rights which served as a good first attempt at suggesting the kinds of property rights which are relevant in the management of biological resources. The development of a new, more rigorous, typology was proposed to avoid the confusion of definition and application of property rights which were mentioned by Vira. Such typology should be organised conceptually, in terms of the social relationships of the objects to which the property rights refer. It should also take into account the temporal frame in which these rights operate, and include an attempt to address the long-term perspective of community rights, which may extend over many generations. PPR were initially seen as being better defined than IPR, but there may be a difficulty in defining PPR if they are interdependent. If rights are defined by these wider relationships, but are only themselves informally constructed, there may be significant changes in the effects of the same type of property right system. It was felt that a rights-based framework alone was insufficient to handle the duties of care relating to environmental issues, whether relating to the human or biological environment. This key point raised issues of the rights and responsibilities of the various parties involved in environmental management and resource use. Cullet also brought up the question of conflict, arguing that the current international regime concerning access to, and control over, biological resources is marked by a lack of co-ordination between the different instruments and institutions dealing with access to biological resources. He stressed the point that this lack of co-ordination actually can and does result in conflict. Edouard Dommen's paper compared the responsible stewardship of land under the Calvinist tradition with that of public policy. He concluded that property rights should be given to whoever can best manage that property in the public interest (property allocation being a matter of public policy), but that this should not preclude the division of property rights. Priority should not always be efficiency, but the needs of the poor. The paper by Irfan ul Haque looked at the area of IPR and technology transfer from the perspective of the South, and concentrated mainly on the TRIPs agreement (Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights). He concluded that the countries of the South need to enter the reviews of the TRIPs Agreement from a position of strength, but that requires building up their collective technical knowledge and expertise. Pierrette Birraux-Ziegler's paper also looked at IPRs, but from the perspective of indigenous peoples, rather than any government, North or South. Traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples is dynamic and adaptive, and built up through long-term experience. She felt that any discussions related to cultural or intellectual rights on indigenous peoples should first refer to their right to self-determination and their territories. Following the paper, discussion focused on the sharing and interpretation by the North of indigenous peoples' community rights and their responsibilities, and traditional knowledge. Germán Velásquez discussed access and affordability of essential medicinal drugs in the current international economic environment (Velásquez Germán, and Boulet Pascale, 1999, Essential drugs in the new international economic environment, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 77(3) 288-292 Matti Vainio tried to establish a link between unclear property rights, environmental degradation and the maintenance of poverty by using case studies on elephant culling and tropical forestry. Aguilera-Klink & Sanchez-Garcia's paper on water rights in Tenerife, made explicit links between property and the social interpretation of physical scarcity as a cultural and social construct, and showed how society comes to deal with that interpretation in terms of regulation. Discussion of the difficulties in defining property rights also covered complexity (which formed the main focus of EVE Workshop 1), seen as producing systematic asymmetries likely to make sustainability very difficult. For example, if something is produced for sale in a market, it must be in a form which is capable of demarcation, and from the systems dynamics perspective, this is often difficult to diffuse and disentangle. For initial appraisal, and subsequent transfer of resources, it is vital to know who owns a resource. In the event that no-one owns it, then the nature of non-ownership is important. The ownership of a property right may greatly reduce the freedom of action for regulatory bodies. The appraisal link is crucial, and it is fundamental for attempts of monetary environmental valuation that property rights are clarified first. A notional property right is needed to use a contingent valuation survey approach, but it can be abandoned in producing the answer at the end of the study. Many of the issues raised were highly complex and require in-depth research. These include:
Workshop Participants:
Contact Details: Roderick J. LawrenceCentre for Human Ecology and Environmental Sciences Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences University of Geneva 102 Boulevard Carl-Vogt 1211 Geneva 4 Switzerland Tel: +41-22-7058174 Fax: +41-22-7058173 E-mail: [email protected]
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). He argued that it was a mistake for the TRIPs agreement to treat life-saving drugs the same way as any other product with respect to patents and that this impacts on the equitable access of populations or developing countries to health and drugs.