Closing the deal: politics and economics of tenure review

Until 1992, land on the eastern slopes of New Zealand’s South Island was owned by the Crown and leased for pastoral sheep grazing. This land in Crown pastoral leases comprised 20% of the South Island, or 10% of NZ’s landmass. Since 1992, the pastoral leaseholders have been able to enter negotiations with the Crown to split the leased land – land below 1000m is privatised, whilst land with conservation values (usually above 1000m) shifts into public conservation land. The papers I will present use the theories of rents, bargaining, administrative politics, and public choice to examine financial outcomes from New Zealand land reform. Results are inconsistent with payments arising from a bargain in which both the Crown and lessee advocate to their full potential, and are instead consistent with the Crown backing down to lessees’ desires for a generous deal. This back-down stems either from 'bureaucratic coping', or from the addition of a bureaucratic middleman between the Crown principal and its negotiator subagent, exacerbating the principal-agent problem

Whither the Crown’s interest in South Island high country land reform?

The South Island high country has long been the subject of debate over resource use and ecological protection. Since early 2006, the ownership and relative value of property rights in high country pastoral leases have become controversial. This article reviews recent research (chiefly Brower (2006) and Brower, Monks and Meguire (in review)) on the law, politics and economics of land reform in the high country

Halting indigenous biodiversity decline: ambiguity, equity, and outcomes in RMA assessment of significance

In New Zealand, assessment of ‘significance’ is undertaken to give effect to a legal requirement for local authorities to provide for protection of significant sites under the Resource Management Act (1991). The ambiguity of the statute enables different interests to define significance according to their goals: vested interests (developers), local authorities, and non-vested interests in pursuit of protection of environmental public goods may advance different definitions. We examine two sets of criteria used for assessment of significance for biological diversity under the Act. Criteria adapted from the 1980s Protected Natural Areas Programme are inadequate to achieve the maintenance of biological diversity if ranking is used to identify only highest priority sites. Norton and Roper-Lindsay (2004) propose a narrow definition of significance and criteria that identify only a few high-quality sites as significant. Both sets are likely to serve the interests of developers and local authorities, but place the penalty of uncertainty on non-vested interests seeking to maintain biological diversity, and are likely to exacerbate the decline of biological diversity and the loss of landscape-scale processes required for its persistence. When adopting criteria for assessment of significance, we suggest local authorities should consider whose interests are served by different criteria sets, and who will bear the penalty of uncertainty regarding biological diversity outcomes. They should also ask whether significance criteria are adequate, and sufficiently robust to the uncertainty inherent in the assessment of natural values, to halt the decline of indigenous biological diversity

Comparative genomics of small RNA regulatory pathway components in vector mosquitoes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Small RNA regulatory pathways (SRRPs) control key aspects of development and anti-viral defense in metazoans. Members of the Argonaute family of catalytic enzymes degrade target RNAs in each of these pathways. SRRPs include the microRNA, small interfering RNA (siRNA) and PIWI-type gene silencing pathways. Mosquitoes generate viral siRNAs when infected with RNA arboviruses. However, in some mosquitoes, arboviruses survive antiviral RNA interference (RNAi) and are transmitted via mosquito bite to a subsequent host. Increased knowledge of these pathways and functional components should increase understanding of the limitations of anti-viral defense in vector mosquitoes. To do this, we compared the genomic structure of SRRP components across three mosquito species and three major small RNA pathways.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The <it>Ae. aegypti, An. gambiae </it>and <it>Cx. pipiens </it>genomes encode putative orthologs for all major components of the miRNA, siRNA, and piRNA pathways. <it>Ae. aegypti </it>and <it>Cx. pipiens </it>have undergone expansion of Argonaute and PIWI subfamily genes. Phylogenetic analyses were performed for these protein families. In addition, sequence pattern recognition algorithms MEME, MDScan and Weeder were used to identify upstream regulatory motifs for all SRRP components. Statistical analyses confirmed enrichment of species-specific and pathway-specific cis-elements over the rest of the genome.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Analysis of Argonaute and PIWI subfamily genes suggests that the small regulatory RNA pathways of the major arbovirus vectors, <it>Ae. aegypti and Cx. pipiens</it>, are evolving faster than those of the malaria vector <it>An. gambiae </it>and <it>D. melanogaster</it>. Further, protein and genomic features suggest functional differences between subclasses of PIWI proteins and provide a basis for future analyses. Common UCR elements among SRRP components indicate that 1) key components from the miRNA, siRNA, and piRNA pathways contain NF-kappaB-related and Broad complex transcription factor binding sites, 2) purifying selection has occurred to maintain common pathway-specific elements across mosquito species and 3) species-specific differences in upstream elements suggest that there may be differences in regulatory control among mosquito species. Implications for arbovirus vector competence in mosquitoes are discussed.</p

When the law is silent, trespassers w... : law and power in implied property rights

When it comes to property, the law does not always rule.We looked at prices emerging from on-going and hotly contested bilateral exchange of property interests in land in New Zealand high country of the South Island.Does relative value of property rights exchanged drive prices? In other words, does an economic interpretation of the law drive prices?This question has two components: who owns what rights? What is the value of those rights?Empirical economics research is used to impute the value of the property rights, and four competing interpretations of the law are tested concerning ownership of property rights in this exchange.Found that none of the stated arguments about who holds which rights (and how much they’re worth) explains the observed pattern of prices.So we turned to dynamics of the negotiation, and other ideas of political economy to offer explanations of the prices

Is collaboration good for the environment? Or, what’s wrong with the Land and Water Forum?

Collaborative environmental governance is a prominent approach to natural resource governance in New Zealand. It is emerging in the Land and Water Forum, Canterbury Water Management Strategy, and the proposed Resource Legislation Amendment Bill. This article reviews political and economic theory to ask if collaboration is good for the environment in the context of the Land and Water Forum. Interest group and public choice theories offer cogent reasons for pessimism. Elinor Ostrom’s and Guy Salmon’s models offer reasons for optimism. I conclude that the most pertinent parts of Ostrom’s model for New Zealand are her caveats. Her model applies to closed systems, not open systems such as rivers with down-stream effects like nitrate E. coli contamination. In open ecological systems, pessimism about local collaborative environmental governance is warranted unless decisions are shackled to strong and unambiguous national regulation. Without strong regulation, collaborative governance creates systems in which those not invited into the collaborative deliberation do not count. In natural resource governance, this dynamic will favour resource development interests over conservation. I conclude that collaborative environmental governance risks being less than democratic, less than fair, and less than good for the environment. Not surprisingly, optimists and pessimists would view the Land and Water Forum differently. Optimists would say that it is an incomplete application of a promising model. Unfortunately, ecological outcomes data to settle the question are rarely collected internationally and do not exist yet in New Zealand. Pessimists would say it was doomed from the start by power imbalances, displaced and subjugated environmental goals, and a fundamental lack of democracy. Such pessimists might say Fish and Game was wise to pull out in November 2015, but would have been wiser to pull out sooner

Property law in the South Island High Country - statutory, not common law leases

This article examines the statutory, common law, and traditional foundations of property rights in pastoral leases in order to look at recent changes in government policy regarding the implementation of the South Island high country land reform. Called tenure review, this land reform divides Crown land into two distinct forms of tenure – freehold title and full Crown ownership to be managed for public conservation. Tenure review began inside the bureaucracy of the Department of Lands (now called Land Information New Zealand, or LINZ). The Crown invited holders of pastoral rights to enter voluntary negotiations to determine which land would transfer into freehold ownership, and which would shift into the public conservation estate. In 1998, Parliament granted statutory authority to the administrative process, and formalised the pre-existing rules

Does tenure review in New Zealand’s South Island give rise to rents?

Under “tenure review,” a New Zealand pastoral lessee surrenders part of his leasehold toconservation and acquires a freehold interest in the remainder. 28 new freeholders paid the Crown$6.9 million for freehold rights to 101,752ha, then sold 46$135.7 million. Wemodel tenure review as a sequential real option – first to acquire freehold, then to subdivide andsell all or part of their new freeholds. We find little evidence that the Crown accounted for theseoption values when negotiating tenure review, and conclude that the capital gains enjoyed byformer lessees are rents

Equity in sharing the potential benefits of REDD+ in Nepal

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is an incentive based climate change mitigation measure that focuses on reducing carbon emissions by rewarding communities’ efforts in the conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of carbon stocks. Assuming REDD+ revenues are generated, there is a question about how the benefits should be distributed. This paper uses the 3Es (Effectiveness, Efficiency and Equity) criteria in sharing the benefits of REDD+ to examine a case study in one of Nepal’s REDD+ pilot projects implemented in community forests. While concerns about equity in REDD+ are getting attention worldwide, the literature is not clear on which principle of 3Es should be given priority to achieve overall effectiveness in reducing the carbon emissions. Our research finds that equity should be prioritised to achieve efficiency and effectiveness of REDD+. Further, we find distributive equity to be the most important. Distributive equity is understood in three different ways in Nepal: rights, needs, and performance. But there is a debate on which equity should be given priority. The issues of needs vs. performance in determining what is equitable should be solved by the formulation of guidelines for how benefits should be shared at two levels in Nepal. First, the vertical distribution of benefits should be based on the ownership of carbon benefits and performance criteria. Second, at the community level, the community itself should determine the form of horizontal benefit-distribution, based on its definition of needs

Does tenure review in New Zealand's South Island give rise to rents?

We examine land prices arising from tenure review of South Island high country pastoral leases. Tenure review splits the leasehold – part is converted to freehold ownership, and part is converted to public conservation land. The Crown sells its residual interest in the most developable part of a leasehold, and buys the lessee’s interest in the part with conservation value. Of the 77 runs that completed tenure review from 1992-2008, at least 28 new landowners have on-sold 176 parcels of newly freeheld land. In gross, these 28 new owners paid the Crown $6.9M to freehold, and have realized$134 million after on-selling 45,266ha, 44% of their new freeholds