This article introduces a symposium on decentralized approaches to environmental management. These approaches include voluntary contributions to public goods, bundling contributions with private goods, and bundling the use of the environment with private goods. The article compares and contrasts the Coasean property rights perspective on such arrangements with the Pigouvian perspective of public economic theory. It further evaluates the efficiency of such arrangements through the lens of the excludability and nonrivalry problems, which are common to both perspectives. We conclude that both perspectives provide important insights for a comparative analysis of nonregulatory and regulatory approaches.