Conservation and Change: A Global Conceptional Framework for Property Rights and Compensation

Justification of the paper Situations of change represent a modification from conservation toward non-conservation and vice versa and are often connected with compensations. Systems which are capable to provide a systematic... [ view full abstract ]

Justification of the paper
Situations of change represent a modification from conservation toward non-conservation and vice versa and are often connected with compensations. Systems which are capable to provide a systematic overview on such situations, are applicable on examples globally and which can provide an useful starting point for further analyses could not be found yet.

Purpose
Based on Mauerhofer (2014) the paper offers an improved conceptual framework based on property rights and financial compensation in different nature conservation situations in order to provide a globally applicable system for the assessment of participation of public and private stakeholders in envisaged changes within those situations. The main concepts used are the one on property rights from Schlager and Ostrom (1992) as well as the one from Mauerhofer and Nyacuru (2013) on differentiation between conservationist and non-conservationists in compensation situations.

Results and conclusions
The theoretical utility of this improved framework is demonstrated by testing it by means of a random sample of 74 papers (25%) out of representative 297 papers from the academic literature dealing with property rights. These 74 papers provided practical examples for situations of change in conservation as evidence for most case of the concept. The framework also proofed to be appropriate for formally (rule of law based) and informally (customary law based) institutionalized situations where rights are given to public and private stakeholders for other practical cases of public participation.

Implications for Tipping Points
The concept aims to support the assessment of situations which constitute a potential threat to biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity is already considered to exceed by far the Planetary Boundaries.

Key words:
environmental protection, negotiation framework, legal position, ownership, proprietorship, disaccord