Private rights in public resources: The role of equity in market-based environmental policies

This dissertation documents and explains the role of equity in market-based environmental policies. The research focuses on two important environmental laws: the Acid Rain Title of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), and the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act (TGA). Both laws embraced a market-based approach, creating limited quantities of strong, property-like rights in public resources. The emission allowances and grazing permits created by the two laws respectively were not fully vested powers of ownership, but were designed to capture many of the qualities and benefits of private property. This study uses the term "refined property" to describe this limited form of legal ownership and to link the two cases analytically.; The research reviews legislative records, administrative documents, and interviews with key policymakers to confirm that much of the debate over both programs centered on the equity of proposed initial allocations of refined property rights. It then uses opposing property theories based on "intrinsic" versus "instrumental" ideas of ownership to provide a theoretical basis for the competing ideas of fairness in play. The data confirm that despite different historical and ecological settings, the equity arguments in both cases were quite similar. The data also show that a similar process led to the final set of allocation rules in each case, as decision-makers started with rules supported by an intrinsic theory of property and then moved towards the opposing instrumental view without abandoning the intrinsic position. This process evokes the Hegelian theory of property, in which society achieves a synthesis of opposing property ideas in a similar manner.; The prominence of equity arguments and the Hegelian approach to allocation in the two cases contradicts the traditional view that the TGA and the CAAA simply "grandfathered" rights to existing users. It shows that equity in fact plays a central role in shaping market-based policies, and that scholars of public policy would do well to study and inform that part of the process. It also suggests that the initial allocation of rights in such policies, while theoretically unrestricted, may in practice be quite limited by the pervasive influence of the Hegelian perspective.