Background: Property rights to natural resources comprise a major policy instrument in efforts to advance sustainable resource use and conservation. Debate over the relative effectiveness of different property rights regimes in reaching these goals remains controversial. A large, diverse, and rapidly growing body of literature investigates the links between property rights regimes and environmental outcomes, but has not synthesized theoretical and policy insights within specific resource systems and especially across resource systems. Methods:We conducted a systematic review following CEE Guidelines in which we collected empirical evidence from the past two decades on the environmental impacts of property rights regimes in fisheries, forests and rangelands in developing countries. We used a bundle of rights approach to assess the impacts of state, private, and community property regimes, as well as mixed regimes and open access conditions. Outcomes were classified as positive, negative, neutral or undetermined. We also collected information on contextual and other factors thought to influence effect of property rights regimes on environmental outcomes. The search covered 90 online databases and three languages, resulting in a total of 34,984 screened titles.Results: This review identified 103 articles consisting of 374 property regime studies: 55% of the studies related to forestry, 31% to fisheries, and 14% to rangelands. The majority of the studies comprised case-control studies but presented limited information on the baseline condition of the resource system. Only 26 studies used before-aftercontrol-impact (BACI) design. We found that property regime comparisons differed across resource domains with, for example, the majority of fisheries studies using comparison to an open access situation while forest and rangeland studies were more mixed in regime comparisons. After critical appraisal of included studies, only 80 studies were accepted for the narrative synthesis. The key contextual factors largely associated with reported positive environmental outcomes across the three resource systems included monitoring and enforcement systems, resource use pressure, and the presence or absence of clear, stable and legitimate rights (i.e. 'positive regime characteristics').

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Background: Property rights to natural resources comprise a major policy instrument for those seeking to advance sustainable resource use and conservation. Despite decades of policy experimentation and empirical research, however, systematic understanding of the influence of different property rights regimes on resource and environmental outcomes remains elusive. A large, diverse, and rapidly growing body of literature investigates the links between property regimes and environmental outcomes, but has not synthesized theoretical and policy insights within specific resource systems and especially across resource systems. Here we provide a protocol for conducting a systematic review that will gather empirical evidence over the past two decades on this topic. We will ask the following questions: a) What are the environmental impacts of different property regimes in forests, fisheries, and rangelands? b) Which property regimes are associated with positive, negative or neutral environmental outcomes? c) How do those environmental outcomes compare within and across resource systems and regions? Methods: We will assess current knowledge of the environmental impacts of property rights regimes in three resource systems in developing countries: forests, fisheries and rangelands. These resource systems represent differing levels of resource mobility and variability and capture much of the range of ecosystem types found across the globe. The review will use a bundle of rights approach to assess the impacts of three main property regimesstate, private, and community-as well as mixed property regimes that involve some combination of these three. Assessment of the impacts of property rights regimes across a range of different resource systems and ecosystem types will enable exploration of commonalities and differences across these systems. Our analysis will emphasize major insights while highlighting important gaps in current research.

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