Assessing national wetland policies’ portrayal of wetlands: Public resources or private goods?

Despite varying degrees of regulation, policies and standards across different nations, wetlands are consistently being destroyed, devastated and converted to other land uses at a rate more rapid than any other ecosystem. We attempt to understand this disconnection between policy and wetland protection by comparing how wetlands are portrayed in eighteen national wetland policies. It was found that nations with strong-market economies tended to subjectively and objectively characterize wetlands in a vague and indirect fashion; whereas nations with weaker-market economies tended to portray wetlands in a direct and distinct fashion. The results suggest that higher degrees of wetland protection are offered in national policies when wetlands are portrayed as public resources; conversely when wetlands are portrayed as private goods, policies are less apt to provide clear platforms for economic incentives leading to ecosystem-wide protection. Given the state of global wetland health and the alarming trend of global wetland decline, we argue that wetland policy frameworks should portray wetlands as public resources in a direct and prescriptive fashion.