This article advances the proposition that the creation of property rights, whether by contractupon-negotiation or edict, is far more significant than what has been described as "Coasian bargaining" in effecting sustainable development. By "creation" we intend the neo-institutional economist's sense of establishing a degree of exclusive property rights for common property or devising new contractual arrangements in which private property rights are entrenched. This is sometimes mistakenly confused with the assignment of property rights. "Sustainable development" is understood as the transformation of negative into positive externalities or a state of the tragedy of the commons into a vibrant resource nourishing industry. Two real-world cases involving government planning are used to illustrate this proposition. KeywordsCoasian bargaining, creation of property rights, open access resource, planning by contract, planning by edict Well-defined property rights and rule of law are all that is necessary to protect the environment from "tragedy of the commons" outcomes … government regulation to achieve environmental objectives typically does worse than private property rights and free markets. To begin with, regulators typically will not have access to the information generated by and available to

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The question….is not whether billions of people will soon gather together in cities, but where and under what conditions. Under conditions of policy-as-usual, people will flock to slums that surround cities whose governments either do not want additional residents or are incapable of accommodating them. Many people will become second-class citizens in informal settlements that, by definition, offer none of the protections that formal rules can provide. Even for migrants who manage to gain access to formal systems of rules in the developing world, the protections and opportunities in the cities that will accept them will often be well below those offered by the rules in the cities where they would rather live (Fuller and Romer, 2012: p.3). Many refugees are no strangers as global citizens, highly-educated, entrepreneurial, and happen to be trapped in circumstances that waste their universal values and potential. This situation is not sustainable.