How societies can cope with flood risk along coasts and riverbanks is a critical theoretical and empirical problem – particularly in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the increased severity of floods. An example of this challenge is the growing costs of publicly-funded flood defense in Britain and popular outcries during the regular occasions that the British government fails to protect property and land during heavy rains. Traditional approaches to institutional analysis suggest that flood management is either a public good that only the government is competent to provide or a private good to which individual landowners are ultimately responsible for supplying. We argue that an important cause of failure in flood management is mismatched property rights. This is where the scale of natural events and resources fail to align with the scale of human activities, responsibility and ownership. Moreover, the spatial dimensions of floods mean that their management is often appropriately conceptualized as a common pool resource problem. As a result, commons institutions as conceptualized and observed by Elinor Ostrom are likely to be major contributors to effective flood management. What governance process should decide the size and scope of these institutions? We argue that bottom-up responses to problems of mismatched property rights are facilitated within larger societies that are characterized by market processes. Moreover, the wider presence of price signals delivers to local communities essential knowledge about the cost of maintaining private property and the relative scarcity of the communal goods. We discuss how our theoretical positions align with experience in Britain and what the implications of our theoretical approach are for facilitating the development of better institutions.

中文翻译：

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奥斯特罗姆，洪水和不匹配的产权

社会如何应对沿海和河岸的洪水风险是一个重要的理论和经验问题，尤其是在人为气候变化和洪水加剧的情况下。挑战的一个例子是在英国政府在大雨期间未能保护财产和土地的常规情况下，英国政府提供的防洪防洪设施费用增加，而民众的呼声越来越高。传统的制度分析方法表明，洪水管理要么是只有政府有能力提供的公共物品，要么是最终由个人土地所有者负责提供的私人物品。我们认为，洪水管理失败的一个重要原因是产权不匹配。在这里，自然事件和资源的规模无法与人类活动，责任和所有权的规模保持一致。此外，洪水的空间尺度意味着洪水管理通常被适当地概念化为一个常见的水池资源问题。结果，由Elinor Ostrom概念化和观察到的公共机构很可能是有效防洪管理的主要贡献者。什么样的治理程序应决定这些机构的规模和范围？我们认为，在以市场过程为特征的较大社会中，对自下而上的财产权问题的自下而上的反应得到了促进。此外，价格信号的广泛存在为当地社区提供了有关维护私有财产的成本和公共物品相对稀缺的基本知识。