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This research focuses on a substantial gap between theories of institutions and property rights: institutions are accepted as complex social structures, but property rights are generally considered as simple, that is, either private or public. Although usually unacknowledged, this simplified understanding of property rights is actually based on Samuelson's theory developed six decades ago. According to Samuelson, the inherent characteristics of goods determine whether they are privately or collectively consumed commodities. Although Samuelson does not propose a mandatory unambiguous link between types of consumption and types of ownership, his theory implies that in principle, private goods are consumed and owned privately and public goods are consumed and owned publicly. Thus, in Samuelson's theory, institutions are redundant. This article maintains that people need institutions and organisations because resources are scarce, and most resources are too expensive for individual use/consumption. To access such resources, people form groups and create organisations and institutions, thereby reducing the individual costs of use and consumption. As complex systems, institutions generate complex property rights – common/collective to the members of an organisation, but private to that organisation (the union of members). Furthermore, institutions determine the patterns of interaction between planning and the market (as the two main mechanisms of exercising property rights) at all levels of the multilevel structure of organisations and society. The article argues that Buchanan's theory of clubs offers a more accurate explanation of the nature of property rights as relevant to institutions.

Current social and economic theory has yet to explain why, despite the many advantages of the market mechanism, planning is employed at all levels of market economy. Like other studies, this research proposes an explanation based on the form of property rights; however, it uses specific definitions of market, private planning and collective planning that establish unambiguous links between them and the structure of ownership. Thus, the article supports the position that the employment of planning or market mechanisms in economic and social activities depends solely on the structure of property rights. The contribution of this article is the formulation of two criteria for the allocation of property rights derived from Coase's seminal works, termed in this text as Coase's criterion of institutional optimisation and Coase's market cost criterion. An important aspect of this proposal is the suggestion that Coase's theory can be a powerful tool with which to study shared/common entitlements. It illuminates the nature and the mechanisms of private and collective planning and their relationship to the market. The article concludes that private planning may exist only if it is good enough to improve the efficiency of the market. Collective planning is indispensable when markets employ shared/collectively owned resources.

This paper examines the methods of planning of complex systems. More precisely, it applies property rights analysis to the methodology of nomocracy, a leading branch of the theory of complexity in planning. To study the methodology of planning, the paper focuses on its objectives and methods, as well as the characteristics of nomocratic rules. It briefly examines the literature on the methods of planning of complex systems, the methods of the nomocratic approach, and the methods of regulation theory. It then develops a theoretical structure of the methodology of nomocratic planning by employing property rights analysis and finds that the purpose of nomocracy is the allocation of entitlements. Finally, to emphasise the importance of property rights, it discusses some specific findings of Holcombe's work "Planning and the Invisible Hand". Holcombe's work is a well-developed study of the relevance of the nomocratic approach to market functions; planning practices, such as zoning; and topical issues of contemporary urban development, such as sprawl and related new urbanism/smart growth principles. This paper focuses on Holcombe's particularly critical view of the latter. However, while the application of property rights analysis fully supports Holcombe's understanding of the positive connection between nomocratic planning and the market, it also leads to a more favourable view of zoning and new urbanist principles. The paper concludes that the main objective and defining characteristic of nomocratic rules is that they serve to allocate property rights over commonly owned resources.

This research contributes to the debate concerning the nature of planning in complex systems, and particularly to the theory of teleocracy (the approach based on direct provisions aimed at specific ends) and nomocracy (the approach based on rules aimed at general rather than specific ends). It draws parallels with the theory of regulation and establishes a connection between rules, regulation and the nomocratic planning of social activities. It then suggests that a property rights analysis of the forms of social coordination/organisation can be instrumental in understanding the nature of social interactions. Based on the theory of property rights, the study concludes that the use of different types of planning, regulation or market mechanisms of social coordination is closely related to the concrete form of ownership over the resources employed in any given social activity.

This article examines the obstacles to public participation in a representative democracy and the approaches that can help to overcome these obstacles. Democracy is never perfect because of the inherent difficulties of developing democratic institutions, yet the drawbacks of representative democracy are considerably greater than those of direct democracy. We consider public participation as an element of direct democracy integrated into the structure of representative democracy in order to balance the power of the centre with that of the constituent members of the democratic system. We underscore the role of nomocracy, by which we mean promoting the power of equitable legal and other social rules over the power of the centre. In public participation, the functioning of rules faces greater obstacles than in other forms of democracy. Thus, the professionalism of planners and public administrators is particularly important in formulating these rules; it is even more important when the challenges of establishing rules are major or insuperable. We distinguish between two types of planning professionalism: teleocratic (based primarily on technocratic skills) and nomocratic (based on the nomocratic liberal approach). We recognize the significance of the former, but our main contribution to the debate on public participation is to emphasize the crucial importance and priority of nomocratic professionalism in overcoming the difficulties of citizen involvement and the shortcomings of representative democracy. To test our conclusions, we explore the practice of citizen engagement in the process of planning bikeway networks in several large Bulgarian cities, where public participation is frustrated by the prevalence of the teleocratic approach and the lack of nomocratic traditions.