Stéphane Nahrath

Institutional Regimes for Natural Resources: An Innovative Theoretical Framework for Sustainability (2007)

There are few terms that are used in such an inflated manner as the word “sustainability”. Politicians, businesspeople, scientists and all kinds of advertisers consider themselves, their proposals, their articles and their beliefs to be more sustainable than the ones of their competitors. Listerning to them, one gets the impression that our world is the most sustainable one imaginable. Looking at reality, in most situations the exact opposite is true. Globalization accelerates all kinds of industrial, domestic and urban metabolisms and increasingly unbundled market mechanisms are becoming a serious threat for the survival of the reproductive capacities of our common natural resources. With the advancement of globalization and market liberalization, the need for solid institutional mechanisms capable of guaranteeing the survival of normally local and/or regional natural resources has tremendously increased in the last twenty years. Traditional environmental protection policies are incapable of doing this job. Like many other scholars and politicians, we believe that fundamental changes in the way we manage our common natural resources are inevitable if we claim to fight against the “plundering of our common wealth” (Bollier 2002).

The strategic use of time-limited property rights in land-use planning : Evidence from Switzerland

While land-use plans are regularly revised, property rights are extremely stable over time. Yet, the stability of property rights resulting from the current conception of exclusive ownership makes the implementation of land-use plans increasingly complicated, difficult and long. Planners recognized the need for more flexibility in many urban contexts to effectively steer spatial development in the already built environment. Relying on a detailed case study carried out in the municipality of Bienne, Switzerland, this paper examines how a strategic use of long-term ground leases granted on municipal land can allow for increased flexibility in planning. Ground leases are a policy instrument leading to a time-limited division of the bundle of rights between a public landowner and the ground lease holder, who becomes the owner of the facilities on the land for up to one hundred years. The strategic role of ground leases in urban planning remains largely unexplored. This article shows that ground leases are an empirical and practical response of planning authorities to the inflexibility of property rights in given situations where more flexibility would be needed. Public actors can use ground leases to implement an active land policy leading to a better allocation of land to specific projects and to a more precise control of building activity. By analyzing the role of ground leases at the interface between planning and property, this article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationship between land-use planning and property rights.

Why Resource Regimes Fail in the Long Run? The Role of Institutional Complexity Traps and Transversal Transaction Costs

The Institutional Resource Regime framework is a realistic approach of the socio-ecological systems governance and sustainability, which is based on the combination of public policies analysis and institutional economics. If the effects identified by the framework have been confirmed, there is no clear understanding of the institutional mechanisms at work. The integration of a dynamic perspective provides the framework with tools capable of defining the workings of governance and extends its relevance to policy forecasting or specification. To do so, we propose to use concepts belonging to New Institutional Economics. Our research question is how changes in the characteristics of an Institutional Resource Regime contribute to improving the sustainability potential of a Socio-Ecological System. The paper provides an original analysis of environmental governance and transaction costs, which results in three generic theoretical propositions.

Beitrag zur Entwicklung eines Ressourcenansatzes der Nachhaltigkeit: eine Diskussion am Beispiel der Regulation der Bodenressource in der Schweiz

Dieser Artikel zeigt die Relevanz eines nachhaltigen Ressourcenansatzes auf, nach dem die Nachhaltigkeit vor allem eine Frage der nachhaltigen Ressourcennutzung ist, sei es im normativen oder im analytischen Blickwinkel. Der Artikel: (1) Zeigt in welchem Masse das nachhaltige Management der Ressourcensysteme eine Bedingung fur Nachhaltigkeit sine qua none darstellt, (2) bietet einen auf den Konzepten „Ressource“ und „institutionelles Regime“ begrundeten Analyserahmen, (3) illustriert die zwei genannten Konzepte anhand einer Analyse des Bodenregimes und anhand der Entwicklungen des Raumplanungsrechts und (4) schliesst mit einer normativen Anwendung des Ansatzes. Dabei werden die Entscheidungsvorgange bei der Schaffung eines integrierten Regimes zum Management eines Ressourcensystems modelliert.