Do Voluntary Commons Associations Deliver Sustainable Grazing Outcomes? An Empirical Study of England

Some of England’s most ecologically valuable natural environments are situated within common lands. While various waves of enclosure has reduced their extent, up until relatively recently, those that did remain were regulated by a set of stable institutions with ancient origins; with rights and duties falling on owners and rights holders and enforced through common law and the manorial court system. The rights system governing the commons had multiple aims, including economic output, equitable access, and community harmony and environmental sustainability (see Rodgers 2010; Winchester and Straughton 2010; Rodgers et al. 2011; Hodge 2016).

However, in 1965 the commons of England and Wales suffered a policy shock in the form of the Commons Registration Act 1965 that led to circumstances similar to Hardin’s (1968) classic allegory of the Tragedy of the Commons. Specifically, it led to a situation where the sum of individual grazing rights were often far in excess of the carrying capacity of the common land, but there was no formal legal mechanism to restrict access to rights holders. In addition, some areas of land were no longer grazed due to difficulties in building and maintaining infrastructure such as fencing and cattle grids, leading to biodiversity loss and weed infestation (Natural England 2009a).

Within the institutional vacuum generated by the Commons Registration Act 1965, a number of commons associations were formed, often from the remnants of the pre-existing manorial institutions.¹ These voluntary groups were set up by commons rights holders themselves. They had no state authority and relied on their members to agree upon how the common should be managed. Only with unanimous agreement were they able to enter into legally binding agreements or guarantees (Defra 2017).

The policy shock generated by the Commons Registration Act 1965 provides an opportunity to test whether the voluntary commons associations that were formed in its wake were able to deliver sustainable grazing outcomes. We consider the results to be important to both the literature evaluating the effectiveness of voluntary associations and agreements to deliver improved environmental outcomes and to the commons literature.

Starting with the empirical and experimental literature on voluntary associations and agreements, results concerning their effectiveness in delivering improved environmental organisations appear inconclusive (Kotchen 2013; Schleich et al. 2016; Gallier et al. 2017; Kesternich et al. 2017). This is partly driven by the fact that many voluntary environmental organisations have multiple objectives. For instance, as noted by Baland and Platteau (1998) and Tachibana and Adhikari (2009), community values such as identity may be placed above sustainable resource management goals.² Indeed, while collective action is often necessary, it is not sufficient in itself for generating sustainable environmental outcomes. Another reason for the mixed results relates to significant empirical challenges, including the need to obtain accurate data on environmental performance and to address issues associated with selection bias that are likely to loom large in the formation of voluntary environmental associations (Rustagi et al. 2010; Kotchen 2013).³

Currently, much of commons literature employs case-study methodology (Poteete and Ostrom 2008). While the case-study method is undoubtedly rich in its insights and allows for the nuances of place- and time-specific processes to be uncovered, the data derived from case studies are not always suitable for hypothesis testing and are limited in their external validity (van Laerhoven 2010). Larger N-studies that allow for quantitative analysis are therefore highlighted as a means to complement the insights from case-studies and contribute to the commons literature (e.g. van Laerhoven 2010; Coleman 2011).

The second reason why these results are important is that they can help to shed light on the role of the state in relation to the formation and effectiveness of voluntary environmental organisations. Some, such as Mansbridge (2014), argue that the state is necessary to promote voluntary group formation and enable them to continue to be effective.⁴ In terms of its necessity for enabling the formation of voluntary groups, Mansbridge (2014) argues that the state is needed to threaten to impose a governance solution if local parties cannot agree to come together—analogous to the ‘bargaining in the shadow of the law’ literature that sees parties voluntary agree on an outcome in the knowledge that a decision will be made for them if they do not (Mnookin and Kornhauser 1979). In terms of the voluntary association’s continued effectiveness, Mansbridge (2014) argues that recourse to an external sanctioning authority is necessary as purely local sanctions will be insufficient to protect natural resources. This contrasts with some of the empirical literature that has shown that local groups who did not receive state support had improved environmental outcomes. For instance, Tachibana and Adhikari (2009) found that community based management groups in Nepal who did not receive official support had better natural resource management outcomes than those who did. Ito (2012) has also found similar results for community irrigation organizations in rural China. We also hope that our results add to the emerging field experimental literature on common pool resource management that primarily aims to investigate the crowding out effects of centralised interventions (see Vollan 2008; Velez et al. 2010; Lopez et al. 2012; Santis and Chávez 2015).

The remainder of this paper is as follows. In Sect. 2, we provide an outline of the institutional framework of the commons of England, including a brief account of how the commons associations function. In Sect. 3 we present our data and empirical methods. In Sect. 4 we present our results and in Sect. 5 we conduct a number of robustness checks. In Sect. 6 we discuss the importance of our results, both in terms of the literature and policy implications, which is then followed by a brief conclusion.

In England, commons are privately owned parcels of land where third parties also have legally recognised use rights. They currently make up approximately 3% of total land area, and while they are scattered across the country; there are large concentrations in the northwest, southwest and southeast (see Fig. 1). Up until the Commons Registration Act 1965, commons were underpinned by a system of property rights where the lord of the manor owned the land and the local community (including farmers) held use rights that were enforced through manorial courts and common law (Rodgers et al. 2011). Within this legal framework, the rules of levancy and couchancy and stinting were practiced, along with the customary law principle of ‘good neighbourhood’, which provided a reflexive governance regime that is widely considered to have encouraged sustainable grazing practices (Bailey 2010; Rodgers 2010; Winchester and Straughton 2010; Rodgers et al. 2011; Hodge 2016). In terms of livestock, there were two specific mechanisms that encouraged sustainable practices. The first was the rule of levancy and couchancy that required commoners to only graze as many livestock on the common as could be kept over the winter months. The second was the practice of stinting, which consisted of grazing rights being defined by a fixed number of animals that could be adjusted in response to environmental factors.⁵

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However, the Commons Registration Act 1965 required rightsholders to register their nominal access rights, that could then lawfully be unabatedly enforced regardless of the environmental conditions. This legislative change led to the discontinuance of the common law principles of levancy and couchancy and stinting from being legally binding.⁶ This often saw the sum of individual grazing rights being far in excess of the carrying capacity of the common land, but there was no formal legal mechanism to restrict access to rights holders as before. Additionally, registration of common rights under the Act led to under-grazing in parcels of common land where there were now difficulties in investing in communal grazing infrastructure due to the breakdown of the previous institutional arrangement of managing common lands (Williams 2006; Natural England 2009b). The Commons Registration Act 1965 can therefore be seen to have effectively severed previous existing links between principles of sustainable management and common property rights (Rodgers 2010). While the UK government aimed to correct for the perverse outcomes generated by the Registration Act 1965 with the Commons Act 2006,⁷ in the intervening period (the timeframe which is the focus of this study), persistent over-grazing in upland commons and under-grazing in lowland commons were highlighted as a severe threat to biodiversity (Short 2000; Natural England 2009b).

Following the shock generated by the Registration Act 1965, a number of voluntary commons associations were established across the country, where members agreed upon how the common should be managed and how their rules could be enforced.⁸ Despite their voluntary nature, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that they played (and continue to play) an important role in achieving sustainable land management on the commons where they operate. For instance, Rodgers et al. (2011) assessment of Eskdale Common (see Fig. 1) is that the commons association is the main management institution, including in terms of the design and enforcement of stocking rules that are refined and adapted to accommodate change. They found that many of the grazing rights follow pre-existing customary practices. In this respect they found that the commons register is largely irrelevant to graziers when calculating their use rights on the common, illustrating ‘the secondary role that property law structures have on environmental management in the case study’ (Rodgers et al. 2011: 102). Like many other commons in England, Eskdale is party to an agri-environmental agreement, and here they found that not only did the commons association help negotiate and secure the agreement but also administer it effectively, including dealing with potential free-rider activity and disputes among commoners. In addition to the presence of agri-environmental agreements, Eskdale common is also within the boundaries of a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) which places special obligations on landholders to protect the natural environment, which also needs to be accounted for when evaluating the effectiveness of the commons association.⁹

While the case of Eskdale common suggests that voluntary commons associations can be effective tools for sustainable natural resource management, up until now, it is not known whether this is an isolated case or evidence of a more systematic relationship. Furthermore, given the regulatory and institutional overlap that often exists within the commons of England, it is not clear what might be driving the environmental outcomes. If a robust systematic relationship can be established, it would provide valuable insights to the literature. It would also provide important insights for policy makers on whether voluntary associations can be left alone to deliver sustainable grazing outcomes or whether direct regulatory measures are necessary. Therefore, the remainder of this manuscript is dedicated to assessing whether voluntary commons associations are capable of achieving sustainable outcomes.

We use historical spatial data on commons and land use outcomes sourced from the Biological Survey of the common lands in England (Defra 2012) and from the annual Farm Business Survey (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food 2010) to investigate whether management by local commons associations is systematically associated with more sustainable grazing outcomes. We use two-stage least squares regression analysis to examine if commons associations have an effect on more sustainable grazing outcomes using economic heterogeneity as our instrumental variable.

Our estimates above show that commons governed by voluntary commons associations are much more likely to achieve sustainable grazing outcomes. However, it is acknowledged that these results depend on our measure economic heterogeneity being a valid instrument. They also depend on our operationalisation of ‘sustainable grazing’. In this section we aim to demonstrate the robustness of our results. Firstly, we overidentify the estimated model by disaggregating our measure of economic heterogeneity into two separate instruments. Secondly, we estimate the relationship between voluntary commons associations and under-grazing and over-grazing using a multinomial logit regression. Thirdly, we estimate the relationship between voluntary commons associations and over-grazing only. Finally, we control for time stamps to take into account the fact that the data on sustainable grazing were collected over the course of a decade.

Using two-stage least squares regression analysis we have found that commons governed by voluntary commons associations are approximately 84 percentage points more likely to produce sustainable grazing outcomes than those that are not. These results hold while controlling for the individual characteristics of farmers that use the commons, wider governance characteristics (including regulatory overlap such as commons being in national parks) and geographical and biological attributes of the commons themselves.

The policy shock generated by the Commons Registration Act 1965 provided us with an opportunity to test whether the voluntary commons associations that evolved as a result of the shock were able to achieve sustainable environmental outcomes. Our findings therefore make a quantitative contribution directly to both the literature evaluating the effectiveness of voluntary associations and agreements to deliver improved environmental outcomes and to the largely case-study-based commons literature. As noted by Kotchen (2013), the results on the efficacy of voluntary approaches to environmental management have been mixed to date and the literature suffers from empirical difficulties, most notably poor measurement and selection biases. We have been able to deal with the measurement issue by using the recently released Biological Survey of the Common Lands of England that provided detailed and scientific assessment of grazing outcomes on a sample of commons. In relation to the potential for selection bias, we use an instrumental variable approach. We consider that these approaches in tandem enable us to deal with the main empirical problems and to make a claim that voluntary commons associations lead to more sustainable grazing practices.

Our study complements the rich detail of case studies of voluntary commons associations and sustainable natural resource management. For example, the previously mentioned case study of Eskdale Common by Rodgers et al. (2011) sheds light on both the place- and time-specific processes resulting in the formation of the Eskdale voluntary commons association and on the role that its voluntary commons association played in improving the sustainability of grazing practices. Although such case study approaches are incredibly important and necessary in order to improve our understanding of the commons and their management, they do not allow for hypothesis testing and are limited in their external validity (van Laerhoven 2010). By using a unique dataset of 716 parcels of common land in England, our study allows for the scaling-up of local-level findings such as that of Eskdale Common by testing the hypothesis that voluntary commons associations lead to more sustainable grazing outcomes at the national-level.

While voluntary commons associations were found to markedly improve environmental sustainability outcomes, it is also noteworthy that the majority of commons in our sample do not have them.²¹ These results taken together suggest that while voluntary environmental associations can be effective when they exist, they are relatively rare. In terms of policy implications, this suggests that direct government action may still be necessary if widespread environmental improvements are to be achieved. However, governments should proceed cautiously as there is a growing body of experimental literature on common resource management (see Lopez et al. 2012; Santis and Chávez 2015; Velez et al. 2010; Vollan 2008; Cardenas and Stranlund 2000) that highlights the potential crowding-out effects of government intervention on intrinsic motivation to govern commons. Furthermore, the work of Dal Bó et al. (2010) has shown that exogenously imposed governance regimes can be far less effective than those developed endogenously through democratic processes.

As an alternative to direct government regulation, governments could aim to foster the establishment of voluntary environmental associations more widely. This would involve a thorough understanding of the structural impediments to the formation of voluntary associations. In the English context, some of the key impediments to the establishment of voluntary commons associations appear to be (relatively) high establishment and running costs. This is as establishing voluntary commons associations can be particularly complex and time consuming because of the need to secure the participation of all rights holders, whether they are active users or not: a problem that is made even more complex when rights registered under the 1965 Act have been subsequently sold with no requirement to inform the register of the new rights holder. Other impediments to collective management include the reluctance of some inactive graziers to allow new binding rules that they feared might prevent their dormant rights from being exercised at a later date (Rodgers et al. 2011).

It is hoped that some of the impediments to the formation of voluntary commons associations identified above will be addressed through the ongoing implementation of the 2006 Commons Act, in particular through the opportunity for commoners to establish Commons Councils without the need for unanimous agreement of all rights holders. Importantly this reform should reduce establishment costs by lowering search and negotiation costs (as not every single rights holder needs to be contacted and convinced to join the association for it to have binding rules), however it may increase them in other areas.²²

It is worth noting that while we have aimed to deal with endogeneity through the use of an instrumental variable approach, there may be unobservable characteristics among the members of the current voluntary commons associations that differ from those who are not, and this has the potential to bias our results. For instance, Dal Bó et al. (2010) found that those more likely to vote for voluntary governance mechanisms are more likely to act cooperatively in an experimental setting, while Rustagi et al. (2010) has shown that groups with a higher share of conditional cooperators are more likely to have better forest outcomes. These studies suggest there may well be unobservable characteristics that link voluntary commons associations to sustainable grazing outcomes that we have been unable to control for. Nonetheless, we consider that we have provided some useful evidence linking voluntary commons associations to better environmental outcomes. As outlined earlier, we note that the existing literature is mixed on this issue.²³ Ultimately, we hope that our results help researchers and policy makers find the best institutional arrangements to govern the commons.

When assessing our results in terms of their broader applicability, some discussion of the institutional environment that the commons associations are situated within is also necessary. While it is true that the Commons Registration Act 1965 led to a ‘direct’ institutional vacuum in relation to commons management, other governance measures were instituted, and the broader institutional structure of English law remained in place. In terms of the establishment of commons associations, while the government did not incentivise their formation through the threat of intervention if a voluntary agreement could not be reached (indeed the opposite occurred in that they were a response to the withdrawal of a government regulatory framework), it did incentivise their incorporation through the establishment of agri-environmental schemes. These schemes provided funds to farmers for delivering sustainable farming outcomes and were only accessible to common rights holders when they coordinated themselves. In this sense the government provided a ‘carrot’ for voluntary associations rather than a ‘stick’ (as proposed by Mansbridge 2014).

The second important institutional factor relates to the English legal system as a whole. Commons associations are unincorporated bodies that do not have the legal power to bind a dissenting minority and they are only able to make a binding agreement to regulate livestock through unanimous participation amongst rights holders (Rodgers et al. 2011). However, if consensus to form an association can be achieved, the members of the commons associations can enter into a legally binding agreement that enables non-compliers and defectors to be punished through the courts. Therefore, while the voluntary commons associations were unable to sanction non-compliers directly (other than through the use of social sanctions) they could use legal action (or threat of it) to enforce their rules. This highlights the potential importance of a well-functioning legal system in providing an ‘institutional infrastructure’ that enables voluntary environmental associations to continue to be effective in delivering environmental benefits once an agreement has been made.

The 1965 Commons Registration Act was a policy shock that led to the removal of the capacity of commoners to regulate the intensity of grazing via traditional legal means. In response to this shock a number of voluntary commons associations were formed. Using spatial environmental and socio-economic data, we investigate whether these voluntary commons associations were able to deliver improved environmental sustainability outcomes. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find that commons governed by voluntary associations were approximately 84 percentage points more likely to produce sustainable grazing outcomes. These results are robust to the existence of a variety of controls, including the existence of overlapping institutional frameworks. Our results make an important quantitative contribution to the literature evaluating the effectiveness of voluntary associations and agreements to deliver improved environmental outcomes. At the same time, our results complement the rich detail of case studies found in the commons literature by testing the hypothesis that voluntary commons associations are causally related to more sustainable grazing outcomes at the national-level. In terms of policy implications our results are more mixed. This is as while our results show that voluntary associations can deliver more environmentally sustainable outcomes, voluntary associations themselves are relatively rare. This suggests that either direct government regulation is necessary (with the risk of crowding out current informal practices and intrinsic motivation) or governments must be more proactive in encouraging the formation and operation of voluntary commons associations by lowering establishment and running costs.