Allaire, Gilles <br/><br/>
Complexity of commons and property rights regimes: The case of animal genetic resources 

 -  2018.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 47 
<br/><br/> Animal breeds are intangible resources created and maintained by selection activities aiming for “genetic progress,” and they are continuously transformed as a result of these activities and farming practices. Animal breeds (at least for cattle and sheep) have a status of common ownership. The way these common resources are managed, and how the genetic progress is generated, controlled, and distributed, is based on different national and historical contexts of “breeding regimes,” made up of rules and political, scientific, informational, technical, and organizational measures. The bundles of property rights analytical framework proposed by Schlager and Ostrom (1992) is implemented to distinguish these regimes. First, we consider the regime structured in France in the 1960s with the support of the national policy of agricultural modernization, then we turn our attention to the regime that is today the result of recent developments in scientific and technical knowledge, in the context of the liberalization of agricultural policies. Each of these regimes was institutionalized in the context of technological breakthroughs: artificial insemination for the former and genomic selection for the latter. In this article, we analyze the complexity of common resource systems and the evolution of the property rights applied to the case of animal genetic resources and the industry of livestock selection in agriculture. In our analysis of the bundle of rights, we add a right of contribution, taking into account the definition of selective breeding objectives aimed at changing the breed’s orientation (leading to an “alteration” of the breed). While only one breeding body used to have the monopoly of this right for each breed, this is now threatened by the more competitive emerging regime. The economic stakes are different at each of the two periods.