From a Press Release By Anne MacKinnon and Charlotte Hess

UBUD, BALI, INDONESIA - Recent research from all over the world offers a new approach to combating 

poverty and other difficult problems worldwide, an international group of scholars says.

An organization of those scholars will hold a major international conference
in Bali this June including a special session to make their alternative
approach better known to policy-makers.

Examples from all over the world show that communities can successfully set
up their own arrangements for managing natural resources, the scholars say.
The result is greater prosperity for both the local people and the natural
resources they depend upon - such as water, forests, and fish.

Yet the lessons from those communities are often left out of the mix in
international discussions of ways to address poverty. Typically,
anti-poverty policy emphasizes either private-property or
government-controlled solutions. The United National High Commission on
Legal Empowerment of the Poor, launched in September 2005, is an example of
an approach that focuses on creation of private property rights for the poor
as a solution to poverty.

Community management of resources offer another, important anti-poverty tool
that needs more spotlight in international discussion, scholars who have
researched such issues say.

More policymakers world-wide need to be aware of the advantages of common
property management, and include it in the "toolbox" of approaches to
social, economic, or environmental problems, rather rely on only government
or individual private control as the only options, these scholars say.

Accordingly, the biennial conference of the International Association for
the Study of the Commons (IASCP - recently renamed from the International
Association for the Study of Common Property), to be held in Bali in June,
will offer a special session at the conference is designed to educate
policymakers in this new line of thinking, based on some 20 years of
global study of local community arrangements for managing natural resources.

Many natural resources crucial to human survival - like clean running water,
or ocean fisheries - are difficult to lock away from anyone's use, yet easy
to degrade or even destroy with overuse. They are known in technical
economic jargon as "commons." Their management has been the focus of study
for IASCP since its beginnings in the 1980s.

Members of the group have researched how people can pull off the trick of
making successful use, for many years, of "commons" resources that it would
be very tempting - and potentially very profitable - to use up quickly anddestroy.

Conventional U.S. and Western European economic and political thinking would
have it that "commons" resources are simply fated for destruction, on the
theory that people will always act selfishly. Anything that belongs to

everyone nearby just gets overused, the conventional thinking says.
That's atheory called the "tragedy of the commons," as a line of thinking
dating from the 1960s puts it.

That theory sounds plausible, so people have come to believe it. As aresult, many
have argued for, and some governments have adopted, policies that either
privatized common resources, or declared them to be state property.

At the meeting in Bali this June, however, scholars and practitioners from
all over the world will gather to discuss new theory on management of common
resources - with evidence on  how people manage those resources and how
government policies and other programs can either help or hurt such effective local management.

Bali itself is a prime example of commons institutions.  The subaks, or
traditional irrigation systems have been built and managed by farmers that
have lasted over centuries.  Even the cultural heritage of the island-seen
in the dance, music, and art - is a treasured commons.  A variety of field
trips will allow participants to see this up close.  For example, on a
fieldtrip to the village of Catur, participants will be shown the coffee
producing process and learn the lessons of participatory mapping.

At the Bali conference, the kick-off special session for policy makers
and interested journalists will focus on the switch some governments have
begunto make away from the once-popular policy of centralized control of
natural resources.

The new trend in "devolution" of power to the locals promises to give poor
communities more rights over their resources, but there are problems in
implementing the new policy that need to be examined. Speakers from China,
India, Indonesia, Papa New Guinea, Philippines, and Vietnam will discuss
experience with these issues in their countries.

To learn more about the upcoming IASCP International meeting, regional
meetings,  and for references to leading IASCP scholars and publications,

More information at the IASC website.