Through history, Property Rights is an important issue in the systems of the indigenous institutions. What comes to mind when one talks about it is land, housing, money, property, knowledge in terms of books and other resources available as property inheritance in any system whether it is a traditional, kinship, family or other forms .In property inheritance, it is the who has the right to own and to take care of the family and the people of the inherited person. However, property rights take place in many dimensions. It could be a private property rights, intellectual property rights, indigenous property rights and so on.
It is an institutional policy. It play an important role in developing modern economic institutions which can provide the appropriate incentive structures that shape the decisions which will lead toward development. Through history, inappropriate property rights institutions have often had destructive consequences on the environment. In my country, Lebanon, Cedars and Pine forests were covering more than 40% of the land. Through over use of the resources and harvesting without appropriate property rights in the past, the forests now are about 10%. Therefore, a major way for policy to protect environmental resources is to manage and change property rights institutions efficiently because most of the forested land was essentially an open-access resource that is, any one had the right to harvest wood from these lands and consequently, this type of resource is going to be over-exploited; it promotes a situation of use it or lose it', which is a root cause of deforestation. This problem was occurring with great regularity not only in Lebanon, but also in the land and forests resources of most developing countries. So, altering the property rights system in a way to encourage normal incentives for conservation could succeed. Establishing and instituting a system of private individual or small-group property rights in developing countries should take into consideration the demographic population pressures and the equitability of property rights.
