Co‐management or no management: The prospects for internal governance of common property regimes through dynamic contracts

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Abstract
It has been suggested that African rangelands would be utilized and managed on a more sustainable and profitable basis if they were governed by co‐management arrangements, with state governments defining group rights and governing inter‐group interactions and local organizations governing interactions among members within particular groups. In this paper we develop a discrete‐time dynamic model of a rangeland to investigate the possibilities for internal management of resource use interactions within a common property regime. We find that there can be effective internal management without any formal institutional structure within the regime if: (1) group members are confident that the boundaries of the regime will be effectively protected; (2) the group of resource users is kept relatively small; (3) future pasture potential is not overly sensitive to changes in the current stocking rate; and (4) individuals do not discount future payoffs too heavily.