Although many natural resources around the world are still owned and managed by sovereigns, a great many resources have been completely or incompletely privatized in order to enhance economic efficiency, improve environmental management, or both. This chapter and the next focus, respectively, on the utility and limitations of partial privatization and partial publicization as environmental protection tools, which result in mixed public and private (common or individual) property regimes. Complete privatization is addressed in chapter 5.

In a real sense, all existing property regimes are mixed. Pure public and pure private property exist only in the imaginations of economists, legal scholars, and political theorists. Actual property regimes are only more or less public or private. Jim Huffman (1994) has written about the inevitability of “private rights in public lands.” By the same token, there are and probably always will be public rights in private lands. Every property regime, then, is an admixture of public and private rights.

This argument can be extended to claim that all property regimes, as admixtures, constitute common property regimes, on an admittedly unconventional definition of “common.” Thus, all existing property regimes can be reduced to a single type. But to what benefit? How paradoxical and unilluminating it would be to compress the almost infinite variety of existing property arrangements into a single categorical pigeonhole. That is certainly not the intention of this chapter or the next. The goal, rather, is to assess the utility of certain, specifically defined mixed property regimes for environmental protection.