The question of the impact of institutional arrangements on the nature of goods is insufficiently addressed in the literature. By the nature of goods, we refer to the economic taxonomy of goods, meaning their privateness is defined according to their degrees of excludability and subtractability. This paper aims to fill this research gap by examining whether institutional arrangements developed for the management of private goods can reduce the degrees of excludability of these goods. To this end, we analyse four collective farmland management projects in the Isère department in France. We adapt the tool of property as a bundle of rights in order to characterize the impact of these projects on the nature of farmland. Our results show that the distribution of land rights, as well as the rules designed to define land rights, influence the degree of excludability of farmland. We discuss the impact of these findings on public policy-making.

Few studies have highlighted perceptions of urban natural open space systems: land specifically excluded from development to protect ecosystem services. We used a local metropolitan city in South Africa to explore community perceptions of its natural open space system through individual qualitative interviews (n = 40). The objectives were: (1) to identify ecosystem services and disservices associated with the city’s natural open space system, and the reasons thereof, by exploring the relational values of nature held by a diverse socioeconomic spectrum of urban residents; and (2) to identify priorities for protecting the natural open space system by enhancing the benefits and minimizing ecosystem disservices. Reference to ecosystem services and disservices were coded according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) categorization of nature’s contribution to people. Non-material services (relational benefits) were impacted by exploitative material uses, access concerns and (mis)management. Challenges and opportunities identified relate to nature as a resource for supporting livelihoods and lifestyles; community outreach and employment opportunities; personal safety, health and aesthetic concerns; and lack of political accountability and municipal planning in terms of the management of natural open spaces. Innovative collaborative management and stewardship interventions with ecological and socioeconomic benefits should be prioritized to protect the natural open space system.

By taking a historical perspective on the higher education and the housing sectors in Quebec, we demonstrate how the political cleavage around the national question has had long-term effects on the dynamic of contention in these two sectors. At a general level, the presence of this cleavage has favoured the adoption of institutional arrangements related to funding that have allowed the reproduction of social protest over time. Nevertheless, the institutional arrangements vary from one sector to another: in the case of higher education, Bill 32, adopted in 1983, facilitated the division of the student movement into two branches and, to some extent, its dynamism; in the case of housing, the AccèsLogis program and the contribution au secteur, implemented in 1997, ensured the selection of claims for social housing and favoured the grouping that leads this issue. In both cases, the national question is at the heart of the process that led to the adoption of these policies.

The article attempts to illuminate how the concept of accountability is diversely shaped and signified in the theoretical legal discourse. It engages in a threefold mapping review: (i) it portrays, according to the basic divide between the angles ‘within the state’ and ‘beyond the state’, the geographical and functional contexts in which real-world political accountability mechanisms exist and interact; (ii) it interprets an influential legitimating discourse that is being used as a benchmark to appraise institutions and political processes beyond the state – the Global Administrative Law project (GAL); (iii) it highlights how this sort of accountability discourse is tied with demands for legitimacy in global governance that cannot be detached from the old political ideals. Largely oriented towards due process, I argue that the GAL project, in order to maintain a normative appeal, should not ignore larger political ideals, however controversial they might be. Otherwise, it remains a manipulable and hence unreliable cause to be endorsed.