Abstract

Natural resources degradation threatens persistence of biological resources in many parts of Eastern and Southern African regions. In these regions, property rights regimes intractably influence resource utilisation and biodiversity conservation. Hitherto, the underlying causes of varied performances of property rights regimes are rarely collated. Consequently, resource policies are often flawed, resulting in pervasive systems failure and biodiversity losses. In this study, this particular information gap is interrogated by systematically reviewing various property rights regimes, their influence on resource utilisation and biodiversity conservation from wealthy of available literature. The results unravelled that the performance of various property rights regimes are influenced by levels of social capital, encompassing stakeholders’ participation, trust, commitment and social networking at the base regardless of whether the property rights areby full hegemony or sanctioned by higher authorities.This finding closely approximates the concept of environmental subsidiarity in natural resource management. Further, it is concluded that bottom-up self-institutional regulation and top-down state controlplay complimentary if not invasive role to each other. These approaches stimulate sustainable resource utilisation and biodiversity conservation, where legal actors are given full resource property rights to access, own, utilise and exclude intruders to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’.

Keywords:Collaborative governance, environmental subsidiarity, sustainable development, natural resource management.