Even in cases where property rights could be demonstrated by documents pre-dating the war, the state decided to allocate land on the basis of present occupation and cultivation. From the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 to the re-establishment of land ownership in 1992, Cambodia’s natural resources were under a management regime approaching open access, which resulted from a breakdown of the state authority and management system, combined with the dissolution of social capital and traditional common property regimes. The theory of the property rights regime predicts that in cases of open access, where anyone can enter a resource pool and appropriate resource units, over-exploitation of the resource will result (Dasgupta and Heal 1979)