Press Release

WASHINGTON - 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 next 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 – systems called “common property” management – 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 Common Property (IASCP), 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 scholarly 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 and destroy.

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 a theory 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 a result, 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 field trip 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 begun to 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 meeting and for references to leading IASCP scholars and publications, please contact:

Michelle Curtain
Executive Director
International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP)
Telephone: 219-980-1433
Email: iascp@indiana.edu

Or check the IASCP website: http://www.iascp.org

 

Conference Details

Survival of the Commons: Mounting Challenges and New Realities, June 19-23, will be held on the grounds the Agung Rai Museum of Art (ARMA) in the town of Ubud, Bali. The conference is hosted by the Center for Agrarian Studies (Pusat Kajian Agraria of Bogor Agricultural University (Institut Pertanian Bogor).

The special one-day kick-off seminar for policy-makers and interested journalists, “The Devolution of Natural Resources,” will be held June 19. Field tours will be available June 21.

Free access to full-text research papers documenting community arrangements to manage natural resources all over the world are available through a digital library at: http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/.