As population growth and consumption place mounting stress on resources and on the environment, policymakers have become increasingly interested in ways to limit resources use. One obvious mechanism is the permit program. Under a permit program, the government assigns consumption or use rights to a particular group. At the same time, the program caps the consumption or use allowed by recipients of the rights. Programs that confer rights upon a particular subgroup of the population raise an interesting and unique set of concerns. Who should this group be. On what basis should the allocation be made. Should recipients pay for the benefits. What should the nature of the benefits be. The purpose of our research is to understand how the political process has dealt with these questions in the past and with what results. The study is exploratory and is based on information drawn from 12 cases. The analysis focuses on program designs and on the administrative and evolutionary characteristics of the sample cases. For each case, the following questions were asked: Who receives the right. On what basis is the allocation made. How complete are the property rights that are conferred. And what special trends in program development are discernible. All programs that confer rights or benefits are motivated by one of three objectives. Some exist to move publicly owned resources into the private sector for development. Some exist because patterns of use have created externalities either for the user group or for the public, and the government is called upon to regulate that use. And finally, rights are often conferred upon a group to protect that group from the deleterious effects of a market shift. Once cases are typed according to their motivating objective, clear patterns in design emerge. The criteria determining the quantity of rights a recipient will get show a similar clear pattern. (ERA citation 09:047963)