The papers in this workshop summary were presented as a panel at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Common Property in Berkeley, California, June 5-8, 1996. The panel was sponsored by the CGIAR System-Wide Program on Property Rights and Collective Action and all of the presenters were affiliated with that program.

The overarching goal of this program is to contribute to policies and practices that alleviate rural poverty by analyzing and disseminating knowledge on the ways that property rights and collective action institutions influence the efficiency, equity and sustainability of natural resource use.

The program stresses comparative research to yield international public goods. The conceptual framework that guides and provides focus to the Program deals explicitly with the effects of different biophysical, socio-economic and policy factors on the operation and outcomes of property rights and collective action institutions. Insight into those factors and their effects is obtained through comparisons that cut across countries, ecoregions and resources. An understanding of the factors that facilitate or inhibit effective local organizations and appropriate property regimes for one resource can be valuable for developing policies for another resource.

Accommodating multiple uses and multiple users of a resource has been identified as a one of the priority themes for Program, based on its importance for natural resource management, policy formulation, relevance to the goals and mandate of the CGIAR, and potential application across resources and regions.' This theme explores the role of property rights and collective action in developing systems that allow women and men, farmers and herders, or other categories of users to share land, water, or forest resources, for a variety of purposes. Most analyses of the efficiency of natural resource management have failed to recognize that resources often have multiple uses and that there tend to be sub-groups of users who are characterized by their use patterns. For example, the same piece of land may be used for different crops, grazing, and gathering; the same water source can be used for irrigating, washing, watering animals, or other enterprises; the same area of forest can be used for timber, fruits, leaves, firewood, shade, or other products. Some resource uses are complementary, others are competitive, most are somewhere between. Some groups of resource users are mutually exclusive, others are overlapping, most are somewhere between. Recognition of the multiple use - multiple user character of common property regimes suggests more complex problems for policy and programs: How can the resource use patterns of different types of users be accommodated? How do changes in property institutions affect the different uses and users of a resource system?

While public and private property may have overlapping uses, issues of accommodating multiple uses and users are especially critical in the case of the commons. Common property regimes often perform multiple functions for a collective including allocation of multiple resources among multiple uses and users. Among these are the tangible goods such as inputs for production or consumption and intangible goods such as safeguarding against environmental risks or exploitation of economies of scale and scope. Multiple-function common property regimes have been poorly represented by the economic models of strategic interaction (game theory) and dynamic optimization (optimal control). Misrepresentations lead to misunderstandings and deficient policy prescriptions. Negative impacts on short-term and long-term human welfare may be the consequence.

Recognizing the multiple uses and users of a resource reorients thinking about both efficiency and equity. Property regimes and resource management systems that maximize output of a single product may appear to be most productive under conventional analyses, but other regimes (especially common property regimes) may produce a higher value of output when all products are considered and valued. Thus, a private forest monocropped for timber may not be as productive as a forest commons that provides timber, fodder, fruits, rattan, kindling, and medicinal plants. Non-tangible functions, such as risk management or the formation of social relationships of trust (social capital), may also be critical to individual preferences and social choices about resource management institutions. Our understanding of equity shifts when we take into account all the users of a resource. For example, it goes beyond looking at whether land or water is evenly distributed among farmers, to seeing how access to the resource is balanced between a much wider range of users who often differ by class, ethnicity, gender, and place of residence. In contrast to private property regimes that tend to ascribe the entire bundle of rights to a single "owner," many common property regimes assign overlapping or conditional rights to many different users.

The papers in this panel explore several dimensions of multiple-function common property regimes. The overview paper explores the conceptual and analytical challenges of multiple-function common property regimes. Two papers discuss the importance of understanding the competitive and complementary nature of different uses of water and land resources by different users. The final paper focuses on a less tangible function of common property: construction and maintenance of social capital.

The focus on policy by no means implied that participants had a predilection for public sector action to promote NTTPs, as will be discussed further below. Policy prescriptions could include areas in which the public sector might be proscribed from acting, or might prompt NGO or private sector activity.

Other priority themes include: 1) implications for adoption of technology and natural resource management practices; 2) structuring devolution; 3) role of environmental risk; 4) feminization of agriculture and demographic change; and 5) changing market relationships.

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