When Yazid II died in January 724, after less than four years as caliph, he was succeeded by his half-brother, Hisham b. ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 724–43; see Figure 8.1). Yazid II had nominated Hisham to succeed him before his own son al-Walid b. Yazid (r. 743–4). Hisham's claims on the caliphate had been too strong for Yazid II to ignore: Hisham was a senior son of ‘Abd al-Malik, with powerful allies among his maternal relatives in the Banu Makhzum branch of Quraysh, as well as support from his half-brothers and their sons, all of whom were well connected with the tribes of the Roman–Arabian frontier in northern Syria, eastern Anatolia and the Jazira. As one of the younger sons of ‘Abd al-Malik, born in the 690s, Hisham was in his early thirties when he became caliph. However, unlike his immediate predecessors, who had all died aged about forty, Hisham would live into his mid-fifties and so rule for nineteen years.

The challenges that had confronted ‘Umar II and Yazid II persisted: Rome, Iraq, and economic, religious and social change. Hisham had time to consolidate his grip on the revenues of Egypt and Iraq and to recommit to an existential struggle against the Roman Empire. In so doing, he consciously imitated aspects of the reigns of his father, ‘Abd al-Malik, and his older brothers al-Walid I and Sulayman. Like them, Hisham prioritised military success against Rome, using loyal governors and tax reform to seek more revenue from Egypt and Iraq, and publicly promoting the religious legitimacy of his rule. Hisham's focus on both tax revenues and his own investments in land and commercial infrastructure in the Syrian towns and countryside perhaps led to his image as a ‘miser’ (bakhīl) in more hostile strands of the later tradition. These policies were probably a response to the declining opportunities for tribute and loot to be taken on the frontiers and a recognition that the institutional and economic strength of Umayyad rule needed reinforcement.

The decade between 715 and 724 was a turning point both in the character of the Umayyads’ empire and the fortunes of the dynasty itself. More than three generations away from the time of the Prophet, and two generations from the end of the first wave of conquests, the social structures within the empire were changing fast. These changes are reflected in language, with ‘Muslims’ (muslimūn) increasingly used alongside the ‘Faithful’ (mu’minūn), and with ‘Migrants’ (muhājirūn) disappearing from use. ‘The Arabs’ (Ar. al-‘arab) begins to appear more often in the poetry and in the documentary evidence with a collective sense. At the same time, the incorporation of perhaps tens of thousands of enslaved women into the Muslim population, alongside male non-Arabian captives and migrants, was transforming the character of group identities within the garrisons. From this period and after, anxieties about non-Muslims ruling over Muslims and conflicts about unequal treatment of recent converts become prominent features of the source material, as do pressures on tax revenue. These social and economic tensions coincided with an era of dynastic instability, with four caliphs dying in quick succession within the decade. As the caliphs’ supporters jockeyed for power and influence, a major rebellion broke out in Iraq for the first time in a generation and new kinds of unrest appeared in North Africa and Khurasan. Moreover, these short caliphates came after the disastrous failure in 718 of the Marwanids’ aspirations to conquer the Roman Empire and replace the Romans as the representatives of true monotheist faith. Defeat at the walls of Constantinople shook the ideological foundations which had been established by ‘Abd al-Malik and his son al-Walid.

Sulayman b. ‘Abd al-Malik and the Siege of Constantinople

The new caliph, Sulayman b. ‘Abd al-Malik, installed his Muhallabid allies in Iraq and the eastern frontier provinces of Sind, Sistan and Khurasan. Reprisals against their enemies continued; the former governor of Sind, Muhammad b. al-Qasim, and a number of other relatives of al-Hajjaj are said to have been tortured and killed at Wasit. New frontier warfare also began; Yazid b. al-Muhallab, who was made governor in Iraq and Khurasan, set out with thousands of soldiers from Syria, Iraq and Jibal for Jurjan and Tabaristan, east and south of the Caspian (modern northern Iran).

At the beginning of the sixth century, the Eastern Roman emperor, more confident of his security on his northern frontiers, began behaving in a more belligerent fashion towards his counterpart in Sasanian Iran. Violent conflict began in 502 and escalated during the rest of the century. Slow-moving siege warfare in the Fertile Crescent alternated with truces, while proxy conflicts continued at each end of the frontier. These hostilities drew both powers deeper into the Arabia Peninsula, with three important consequences. The first was the continued expansion of the Arabian federations in the north of the Peninsula, on the empires’ desert frontiers. The second was further heightening of the political importance of religion, with various forms of Christianity and Judaism being markers of identity and political affiliation. Third, escalating conflict between the two powers led, at the end of the century, to the collapse of the northern federations and contributed to the weakening of Himyar. These events were the context for the expansion of the influence of West Arabian groups and the formation in the early seventh century of a new religious and political community under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad.

Arabia, Rome and Iran in the Sixth Century

In the sixth century, the Romans replaced a balance of alliances on their Syrian Desert frontier with the sponsorship one ruling clan, the Jafnids, and their allies, known collectively as the Banu Ghassan, or ‘Ghassanids’. This change in Roman policy was probably a response to the military effectiveness of the Sasanians’ alliance with the Nasrid kings of al-Hira, in Iraq. In about 530, Emperor Justinian (r. 527–65) promoted the Jafnid al-Harith b. Jabala to ‘the dignity of a king’, in the sense of a local ruler, acknowledged by the Romans. Papyrus documents from Petra, in modern Jordan, show that members of the Jafnid elite were significant figures on the Roman frontier, called upon to arbitrate in local disputes. Greek inscriptions show that the Jafnids participated in the wider political culture of the Roman Empire while asserting their own religious and cultural autonomy.

In this third section, the perspective is broadened to look beyond the dynamics of conflict and competition within networks of military and political power. Interactions between the majority of the empire's population and its new ruling classes and other longer-term processes of social and economic change are the concerns of its three chapters. Chapter Ten begins with the environmental context, surveying the 8,000km-wide band of territory between North Africa and al-Andalus in the west and Sogdia and Sind in the east which the Umayyads’ armies occupied or contested. From there, it turns to the economic foundations of empire – land use and resources, settlement patterns in the towns and countryside, and commerce and exchange. While there are many deep continuities in the economic and social life of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the Umayyad era emerges as a turning point, when new and lasting economic and social formations took shape.

Chapter Eleven turns to the social significance of religious community and the impact of the conquests and the formation of the empire on the religious groups among the conquered populations. Religious belief and practice had become crucial markers of belonging and political affiliation in Late Antiquity. This was perpetuated and developed by the Arabian conquerors, whose leaders saw themselves as agents of God's rule on earth on the basis of which they made ‘a covenantal pact’ (‘ahd or bay‘a) with military allies and supporters, while tax-paying populations received covenantal ‘guaranteed protection’ (dhimma). With the end of Roman and Sasanian state power, new relationships were negotiated between religious leaders and the Arabian conquerors. In many cases, this led to competition for patronage by the new rulers as well as an expanded role for religious leaders in the context of the transformation of the structures of state power.

Chapter Twelve addresses structures of governance, organisational power and taxation. The military administration established by the conquering armies concentrated power in the hands of the armies’ commanders (umarā’, sing. amīr), among whom the most senior became the leading political figures in the territories they had conquered (whence the other translation of amīr, as ‘governor’).

Our ability to work together or not has a dramatic impact on our ability to resolve any environmental problem. We therefore begin by exploring the concept of collective action, or cooperation. The theory of collective action has been developed in multiple independent disciplines. The perspective of evolutionary theory frames collective action as a mystery: why would individuals cooperate with each other when it is individually costly and publicly beneficial? In environmental studies, the failure to act collectively is associated with the tragedy of the commons, or environmental ruin.

The first chapter in this part deals with the tragedy of the commons as the dominant framing for environmental property rights. Here we will also interrogate the utility of this framing and consider others as well. Chapter 2 builds directly on Chapter 1 by asking how social and ecological boundaries can facilitate cooperation and address the tragedy of the commons. In this chapter we also consider the different types of boundaries that we see and what function they play. Finally, in Chapter 3 we turn to the primary mechanisms for cooperation among humans or any species: reciprocity and kinship. We will also see that the human psychologies of reciprocity and kinship can be used to motivate environmental stewardship and reframe the Western perspective on environmental property rights.

In the previous chapter, we discussed how intergroup competition promotes within-group cooperation. But this is not the only thing needed for cooperation; we must also consider mechanisms that develop and maintain cooperation within groups. The two most well-established mechanisms for enabling cooperation across all species are kinship and reciprocity. We have already touched on reciprocity in the previous chapter.

A large scientific controversy persists over whether intergroup competition and the selection of cooperation at the level of groups, as discussed in Chapter 2, or reciprocity and kinship are the primary factors that enable cooperation. As an outsider to the academic communities involved, my interpretation is that this controversy is in part due to the very same tribal instincts we discussed in Chapter 2: often the easiest way to identify yourself as belonging to a group is to clarify that you don't like “them” and what they’re doing and thinking. In his discussion of the mathematical equivalence between group selection and kinship-based selection, Wilson (2016) – arguably the primary proponent of group-based selection through his multilevel selection framework – has argued that these mechanisms do not need to be seen as mutually exclusive. My interpretation is that cooperation requires the identification of an in-group to ensure that the costs of cooperation are recouped, and that kinship and reciprocity are the two primary mechanisms for this identification. In this chapter, we discuss each of these as mechanisms for establishing and maintaining cooperation, as a means for establishing property rights, and as a way to fundamentally change how we view nature and environmental rights to nature.

Kinship and reciprocity closely relate to the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values. Intrinsic values come from the inside, and need no external reinforcement; extrinsic values are only instrumental, and without external reinforcement, will fade. The dominant Western discourse about property rights and public policy has mostly neglected intrinsic value. This is in part due to an abridged understanding of the nature of human actors as only responding to extrinsic incentives (Bowles 2016). I believe that another reason for this is that certain aspects of intrinsic motivation are harder to implement at scale, which is an inherent goal of any public policy.

This chapter pulls together content from several previous chapters to discuss arguably the most popular type of property-based policies: markets. We have already discussed markets through our examination of exchange rights in Chapter 5. There we associated exchange with reciprocity, establishing trade as a culturally ubiquitous phenomenon. As such we need to distinguish “markets”, which include informal exchange and are found everywhere but are less legible to state actors, with market-based policies, which are public policies that include the allocation of exchange rights and are our subject for this chapter. In Chapter 5 we also considered the goals of equity and efficiency that are a strong part of the dominant market discourse. Efficiency is a primary theoretical motivation for most market-based policies, and so we build further on that discussion here.

In Chapter 6, we introduced the idea of a policy panacea, which we will reflect on a fair amount in this chapter, since the market-based policies we will discuss in this chapter have often received the panacea treatment from their promoters. In Chapter 8 we introduced the idea of a hybrid property regime involving multiple types of actors, each with its own set of rights. In this chapter we unpack market policies as their own kind of hybrid property regime, commonly involving a state actor (or in some cases an NGO) with control rights and resource users with use and exchange rights.

We will explore three types of market-based environmental policies, based on O’Donnell's (2018) classification: (1) public goods markets (e.g., PES policies, conservation easements, certifications); (2) tradeable environmental allowances: shared resource markets (e.g., catch shares); and (3) tradeable environmental allowances: regulatory markets (e.g., cap-and-trade). A public goods market involves an external actor paying a local actor for the provision of a public good, based on a formalized evaluation or certification scheme. A prominent example of what O’Donnell (2018) refers to as a public goods market are payment for ecosystem services policies. In this case, money is being exchanged for environmental benefits – such as avoided deforestation – that are framed as public goods, and entitlements are granted to landowners.

Exchange, most broadly, is the act of carrying out our psychology of reciprocity. I give you this, you give me that, or in the case of indirect reciprocity, I give you this so someone else will give me that. Because exchange is a form of cooperation, we can view it as the source of social benefit. Ideally, in the case of direct reciprocity, an exchange produces a win-win outcome between the partners involved, because each partner values what they receive more than what they give up. The potential magic here is that social value is created out of nothing, simply by reallocating resources. This simple, imagined scenario drives a lot of policy discourse and decision-making through phrases like “let the market decide”. What does this mean exactly, and how does exchange of environmental rights promote the public good, or not?

In the previous chapter, we unpacked what it means to use the environment, both directly and indirectly. In this chapter we do the same for exchange: what does it mean to trade in environmental rights? To begin, we continue the discussion of entitlements from the end of the last chapter by discussing the role of exchange entitlements. We do so through the lens of what is referred to as a patron-client relationship, which will have us question a win-win, cooperative framing of exchange.

From here, much of the chapter deals with arguments related to exchange and its relationship to efficiency. Efficiency is the primary theoretical motivation for several market-based environmental policies we will discuss in Chapter 9, so it is worth spending some time grappling with the background. We start by engaging with a dominant discourse that argues that markets promote efficient allocations of resources. To unpack this argument, we explore the relationship between efficiency and equity, which can also be seen as an important allocational principle. After this we explore the relationship between efficiency and stewardship, and explore a hypothesis that efficient markets tend to discount broader social and environmental impacts of exchange. Building on this discussion, we consider the argument that alienation, even if it does not necessarily incentivize stewardship, might incentivize development.

What is a policy panacea? One answer is that it is a solution that has been broadly applied, and panaceas are often talked about as being successful in this way. This is not the same thing as whether the policy is successful in producing the desired outcomes; it may or it may not be. The theory of panaceas I develop in this chapter is agnostic about this second type of success. Rather, the theory developed here is about the features of a policy that enable its spread: its evolutionary success as a panacea. For to spread, policies are often expressed in apolitical, highly legible terms and supported by top-down governance, and at the expense of more extensive cooperation across groups.

In this chapter we are doing two things at once. First, we are unpacking the dimensions that enable the panacea problem that I just mentioned. And in so doing, we discuss key issues of environmental policy analysis. Panaceas are about overgeneralizing, usually beyond the evidence, but how do we think about the trade-offs involved in making generalizations? In the first section of this chapter we tackle that question.

From there, we move on to discuss a set of enabling factors for the spread of a policy panacea, starting with a set of psychological biases and heuristics that we all have, and which lead us to favour the spread of a preferred solution, even in the face of contrary evidence. From here we discuss another social aspect of panaceas, and this comes from the fact that preference for any specific policy is closely related to one's social affiliations, to one's membership in a group. And here we tie this conversation back to our previous discussion of intergroup dynamics and the synergy between intergroup conflict and intragroup cooperation.

In the third section we discuss the role of politics. We have already talked about the role that apolitical framings can play in our discussion of the tragedy of the commons and collective action problems in Chapter 1. Panaceas are likewise often cast as apolitical, technical solutions; this helps them garner support by decision-makers who might feel threatened by the spectre of political controversy.

The goal of this book is to synthesize multiple perspectives and evidence on environmental property rights, and thereby improve understanding and decision-making. I begin this final chapter by reflecting on the methods used to conduct this synthesis. After this, I outline two ways in which we can use this synthesis to make better environmental policy decisions. First, I discuss a process of institutional diagnosis (Ostrom et al. 2007a; Young 2002). This is a process of ascertaining the relevant features of a problem to explore their implications for the design of responses. In the second section below, I describe how this book can be used to diagnose environmental problems by drawing questions from each chapter that we should ask about a problem and its possible solutions. Second, I discuss how expertise depends on the qualities of the expert. Here I am drawing on work by Matson, Clark and Andersson (2016), who describe qualities of effective sustainability leaders. The third and final section in this chapter explores the qualities of the experts who would be making the prescriptions based on these diagnoses.

Methods

Much of the motivation for this book is my perception of the synthesis bottleneck in the study of environmental property rights that results from the siloed nature of research. The goal here was to pull together multiple disciplines to tell a more comprehensive story about the meaning and role of environmental ownership. It is worth reflecting here on the methods that I used and the implications these have for how we should interpret this work. Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom (2010) reflect on the various methods that are used by scholars in the study of environmental commons governance. The types of studies that they consider are found through the pages of this book: individual and comparative case studies, experiments, large-n analyses and synthetic meta-analyses. And the method for the book as a whole is reflected in what Poteete et al. (2010) call a qualitative “narrative synthesis”, with their prime example of this being the well-known work on natural resource management by Baland and Platteau (1996).

In this chapter we unpack the bundle of rights concept by exploring three categories of rights: direct use, use entitlements and control. Theoretically we could explore the idea of control entitlements, but we will leave that for another day. We begin by building on our collective action framing from Chapter 1 by discussing the nature of control rights (institutional design, allocation and enforcement) as public goods. A well designed environmental property regime isn't free: someone has to design it and implement it, and others will have incentives to free-ride on costly governance activities.

From here, the majority of the chapter focuses on use rights. In Chapter 2, we questioned a common framing of the commons as being subtractable: if someone uses a forest, this means someone else cannot. But as we saw, this depends on what we mean by “use”. Thus how we understand environmental use has implications for how we frame the main challenges to be addressed by environmental rights. A common theme we will see is that use of the environment is a common way to also establish ownership (e.g., squatting is a way of establishing access rights), which itself is an allocation right. In this way, use and allocation rights intersect. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of use entitlements, or the indirect benefits that actors can claim based on how the environment is used by themselves or someone else.

Design, allocation and enforcement as public goods

The control rights of institutional design and enforcement confer power and responsibility. The development and enforcement of rules to enact use rights can be thought of as public goods: they may benefit a whole group, but are costly to provide. Thinking again of the Dominican fishing village, if the fishers could agree to a set of rules about fishing rights and obtain some degree of compliance, they could all benefit from a sustainable fishery. But who is going to make the effort to achieve this? The provision of enforced social institutions is a second-order collective action problem since individuals have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others to craft and enforce institutions. Previously we have discussed first-order collective action problems, such as the problem of overusing a shared resource.

To further explore the tragedy of the commons and collective action, we turn to the topic of boundaries. Boundaries are critical for understanding what commons are and how collective action works. In the beginning of his depiction of the pasture and its herdsmen, Hardin (1968: 1244) asks the reader to “picture a pasture open to all”. “Open to all” means an absence of boundaries that would limit access to the pasture. In Governing the Commons, Ostrom (1990) argued for the feasibility of community-based resource management by presenting a set of design principles that can help communities overcome collective action problems involved in managing shared resources. These principles are Ostrom's most famous theoretical contribution to the study of environmental policy and governance. I refer to these throughout this book and a version of them based on my own work (Cox, Arnold & Villamayor-Tomas 2010) is included in the Appendix. Ostrom's first principle (which is divided into two in the Appendix) calls for clear social boundaries around legitimate users to distinguish them from non-users, and for biophysical boundaries around community-owned resources. The combination of social boundaries that define who is in and who is out, and biophysical boundaries indicating which parts of the environment are accessible by those who are “in”, is one way to define environmental property rights.

This chapter explores the importance of social boundaries as a key factor in promoting collective action by looking at the relationship between cooperation within groups and cooperation and conflict between groups. We will see that boundaries play the same role within the context of environmental property as they do in the context of collective action theory. The later parts of the chapter explore different types of boundaries and the roles they play. Here we first explore the difference between rigid and contextual boundaries, and we conclude the chapter with a discussion of general purpose versus special purpose boundaries as a way to understand the concept of common property, or the collective ownership of a resource by a group.

Appendix: Ostrom’s design principles

In this final part of the book, we will discuss two interrelated ideas: property regimes and policy panaceas. An environmental property regime refers to the type of actor claiming ownership over the environment. A policy panacea is a public policy that is promoted as a fix for a type of problem, regardless of case-based and political context. The connection between them comes from the fact that all policy panaceas with respect to environmental property rights are based on assumptions about property regimes.

We begin our discussion by unpacking the elements and enabling factors of policy panaceas in Chapter 6. From here, in Chapter 7 we move to one of the most important distinctions with respect to property regimes: individual rights versus common property. These are often thought of as being mutually exclusive, but as we will see in this chapter, they are not, and their relationship has multiple elements to it. Building on this, in Chapter 8 we discuss the meaning of public property and consider the role of the state in environmental governance. We also consider a relative newcomer to the property regime discourse: nature itself. Finally, we question the significance of property regimes as a broad way of classifying complex realities, and we introduce the idea of a hybrid property regime to help make sense of this complexity. We conclude Part III in Chapter 9 with a discussion of market policies as an example of a hybrid property regime, and maybe the most prominent example of environmental policy panaceas.

The fishers in the Dominican Republic are facing the potential collapse of their fishery. The dominant narrative for why this is happening is known as the tragedy of the commons, popularized by Garrett Hardin through an article of the same name (Hardin 1968), although Hardin attributed his inspiration to William Forster Lloyd, a British economist and historian. The tragedy of the commons is the single most common narrative used to motivate the implementation of environmental property rights. In this chapter we discuss how it has been used and how it relates to theories and models of cooperation. We will also explore the limits of the idea by considering what it leaves out: namely, inequalities of power and influence. We conclude by considering additional theories that need to be considered when describing the causes of environmental degradation that need to be accounted for by environmental institutions.

The famous scenario that Hardin got from Lloyd is the one that sticks with most with people who have read his work. It is an image of cows on a pasture, with each herdsman deciding how many cows to place on this pasture. This decision is based on two components. First, the individual benefit the herdsman receives from placing on additional cow on a pasture, and the collective cost to the group if overgrazing occurs – too many cows can overgraze a pasture and degrade it. This collective cost is commonly referred to as a negative externality. The meaning of the term is intuitive: it represents the fact that the costs imposed by an individual on a group are “external” to the individual's decision-making or are not accounted for. The problem, as Hardin sees it, is that if each herdsman follows their own individual interest, the collective interest will suffer. It is called a “tragedy” because everybody loses. This gap between the interest of individuals and the interests of the group is known as a collective action problem, and it is closely related to the free-rider problem, which represents the temptation that participants have to free-ride on the contributions of others towards providing group benefits.

In the previous chapter, we explored the idea of a policy panacea. In this chapter we build on this discussion by unpacking the idea of a property regime, which broadly points to who owns the environment. Because the panaceas that we discuss in this book make assumptions about the actors involved, unpacking the concept of property regimes help us understand policy panaceas.

In this chapter and the next chapter, we will address three interrelated questions. First, what do we mean when we talk about a particular property regime, such as individual or public or common property? Second, what are the relationships between these types of property? And third, is there evidence that one or another type of property performs better than the others?

To begin to answer these questions, this chapter focuses on the difference between individual and common property. And to do this, we need to clarify what we mean by each of these property regimes. Common property is an example of collective property, and means ownership by a community. Collective property can also mean ownership by a non-profit organization, by a corporation, or by a state. Individual property means property by individuals, and is often referred to with the term “private property”. But private property really means ownership by any actor other than the state, and so includes other collective property regimes. There is thus a spectrum of ownership from the most individual to the most collective, and to me the transition to the collective level occurs when we move beyond the household unit, even though households are technically made up of multiple individuals.

Let's return to the hypothetical scenario of the Dominican fishery where I have worked. In Chapters 4 and 5, we explored the different rules that the fishers could use to create a system of property rights. But unasked in those chapters was, should the fishers adopt a more individual or common property regime? A tension exists between individual and common property that reflects the divergence between individual and group interests discussed in Chapter 1. Should rights be granted to individuals for their benefit or to the group for its collective benefit? Or can the two types of ownership work together?