SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DI DIRITTO ED ECONOMIA
Sara Lorenzini (University of MilaN)
Nadia von Jacobi (University of Trento)
Abstract
Preserving and protecting the environment has increasingly become of interest to the social sciences. One of economics’ milestone theory on the nature of goods is used across disciplines, with public goods, common-pool resources, private, and club goods representing fixed categories that should be dealt with in different ways. The nature of a good is thought to be an intrinsic feature of the good itself in economic theory. Yet, building on work of the Ostroms, a well-established scholarship has argued for the nature of goods to be potentially flexible, dynamic, and context-specific (Candela and Geloso, 2019; Choe and Sun-Jin, 207; Rayamjhee and Paniagua, 2020). We dig deeper into this topic, specifically in relation to ecosystems, and add indivisibility (Oakerson, 1978) to the criteria of excludability and rivalry as typically used to define the nature of a good. We propose that indivisibility captures what in ecology is defined as interdependence, a type of relation in which a specific element is tightly connected to other surrounding elements and reliant on them. Following this, we also stress that, instead of looking at a good as a unique entity, it may be helpful to emphasize the heterogeneity of use(r)s and the interdependence-indivisibility relations among them, that underlie both rivalry and excludability. We therefore apply the three criteria to such relations, which we investigate through a network approach. The risk of the traditional view is that a single type of use(r) gets mainstreamed and, therefore, others use(r)s become delegitimized. We suggest that this new way of approaching the nature of goods as a complex system improves economic analysis of socio-ecological problems, helps understanding trade-offs between different ecosystems‘ functions and elements, and the role of institutions mediating such trade-offs.