1 Introduction
This paper surveys those aspects of property rights and their creation, administration and trading that are of most relevance to environmental policy, with particular reference to current circumstances and active policy debates in New Zealand.[1]
It therefore begins in Sections 2, 3 and 4 by discussing general concepts such as the difference between private, common and public property, a set of characteristics by which property rights can be defined and the impact of variations in those characteristics on the value of rights (including the main arguments around restrictions on how and to whom rights can be transferred). Section 5 discusses environmental applications of property rights, with a particular focus on using taxes or permits, as opposed to more prescriptive regulatory tools, to control pollution control and manage natural resources (eg, water and fisheries).
Section 6 reviews key details around the major property rights regimes in New Zealand and the relationship between the Resource Management Act (RMA) and private property rights. Section 7 notes some uses of market-based instruments for these purposes in Australia. Concluding remarks are in Section 8.
Notes
- [1]The discussion of property rights in this paper includes those property rights specifically defined by law, but excludes rights created privately under general contract law, securities law or matrimonial property law, as well as Treaty of Waitangi, aboriginal, and customary rights and intellectual property rights issues (including flora and fauna, genetic modification etc). It also excludes any property rights arising from the Kyoto Protocol. This is because each of these could justify a paper in its own right, and the additional light that would be thrown on broader property rights issues by such analysis is limited given the highly specific nature of the factors involved. Conversely, however, the discussion of the broader issues does provide some insight for these specific debates, as demonstrated by the discussion on transferability in Section 3.3.
