Complexities of Climate Governance in Multidimensional Property Regimes

Abstract

This chapter is the first to identify that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency climate change accounting systemically overlooks manipulation of airspaces through wildfire smoke emissions and cloud seeding—virtually unregulated activities undertaken by a mix of public and private actors. These examples illustrate a broader theoretical point: that climate and environmental policy analysis and solutions are hamstrung by the limitations inherent in modern Western conceptions of property. This chapter discusses how a model of multidimensional property—derived from emerging interdisciplinary discussions of overlapping property rights, mismatched property rights, and landscape-level resources—can improve the framing of climate change and other ecological problems, and thus improve available outcomes.