Common property and unregistered access: the losses no entitlement matrix records

1. What is being lost

In most rural economies where large infrastructure is built, household income is not derived solely from the parcel the household holds. It is assembled from that parcel plus a set of access arrangements: grazing on land nobody individually owns, firewood and construction poles from woodland held by the community, thatching grass, medicinal plants, wild foods that matter most in the months before harvest, water for stock, and fishing or gathering rights that may be seasonal and may be held by category of person rather than by named individual.

The share of household income these represent is context-specific and frequently substantial, and it is counter-cyclical: reliance on common resources rises when cultivation fails. That is precisely why their loss is more damaging than its average contribution suggests. The resource that supplies ten per cent of income in a normal year may supply the margin of subsistence in a bad one.

2. Why they fall out of the entitlement matrix

Three mechanisms operate, and they compound. The census enumerates households against parcels, so a resource used by many households and owned by none has no row to appear in. The valuer works to a professional standard that requires an interest capable of being valued and a basis for valuing it, and neither exists. The entitlement matrix is a payment instrument, and a payment requires a payee.

The result is not that anyone decided these losses do not matter. It is that each step in the standard process is individually reasonable and the aggregate silently excludes an entire category of loss. Standards require attention to common property and to economic displacement, and projects report compliance because the RAP text acknowledges the issue; acknowledgement in narrative and absence from the schedule is the characteristic pattern.

3. The distributional consequence

Dependence on common resources is inversely related to landholding. The household with the least land relies most on what is held in common, and is least likely to hold a registrable interest in anything. So a compensation process that captures registrable interests and omits common access transfers value with striking regressivity: the largest payments go to the households with the largest holdings, and the households whose entire margin of subsistence has been removed receive nothing, because nothing they lost was theirs in a sense the process recognises.

This is one of the clearer cases in which a programme can be fully compliant with national expropriation law and squarely in breach of an international standard's substantive requirement, since the standards' eligibility categories extend to those without recognisable legal right precisely to catch it.

4. Assessment without a comparable

The absence of a market comparable is not the same as the absence of a method. Three approaches are used and can be combined.

Direct use valuation quantifies physical offtake — headloads of firewood per week, litres of water, kilograms of fish, months of grazing — and prices it at the local cost of the nearest substitute, which is usually purchased fuel, purchased fodder or purchased water. It is defensible because every quantity in it is observable and every price is local. It requires seasonal data collection, since a single-visit survey in the wrong month understates it severely.

Substitution cost asks what it would cost the household to obtain the same service once access is gone, which is the closest analogue to replacement cost and is the framing a reviewer will find most familiar.

Stated-preference methods have a role in establishing relative importance and a poor record when used to produce a compensation figure, because the incentive structure at the point of asking is transparent to the respondent. Their honest use is in prioritisation, not quantification.

5. Remedies that are not payments

Because the loss is collective, the remedy often should be too, and a per-household cash figure derived from a use valuation may be both administratively unmanageable and a poor fit for the harm. Alternatives include securing equivalent access elsewhere through negotiated arrangements with neighbouring communities, physical replacement of the specific service — a borehole for a lost water point, a managed woodlot for lost fuel access — and community development funds where governance is strong enough that the fund reaches the users of the lost resource rather than those who control the committee.

That last qualification is the weak point of collective remedies and should be stated plainly rather than assumed away. A community fund substitutes an institutional distribution question for an assessment question, and the households most dependent on common resources are frequently those with the least influence over community institutions.

6. Conclusion

Common property loss is not an edge case to be handled if budget allows. It is the difference between a compensation programme that reaches the poorest affected households and one that does not, and it is invisible unless the baseline instrument is designed to see it. The requirement is a seasonal use survey conducted before the entitlement matrix is drafted, so that the matrix can carry rows for access losses at all — a matrix finalised first will never acquire them.