Washington, Sept 19 : An Indiana University scientist, has in this week’s special online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, outlined the causes behind failure of many sound conservation strategies.

University political scientist Elinor Ostrom said, that while many basic conservation strategies were sound, their use was often flawed.

The strategies were applied either too generally, or as an inflexible, regulatory “blueprint” that ignored local customs, economies and politics, she said.

“We now ridicule the doctors who long ago used to tell us, 'Take two aspirin and call me in the morning' as a treatment for every single illness. Resource management is just as complex as the human body. It needs to be approached differently in different situations,” she added.

Ostrom, also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has proposed a flexible “framework” for determining what factors will influence resource management, whether that resource is forest, fish... even air.

“What we are learning is that you shouldn't ignore what's going on at the local level. It may even be beneficial to work with local people, including the resource exploiters, to create effective regulation,” said Ostrom.

Modern conservation theory relies on well-established mathematical models that predict what will happen to a species or habitat over time.

However, one thing these models can't account for are the unpredictable behaviour of human beings whose lives influence and are influenced by conservation efforts.

Ostrom’s approach divides the framework into tiers that allow conservationists and policymakers to delineate those factors that are most likely to affect the protection or management of a given resource.

The first tier imposes four broad variables: the resource system, the resource units, the governance system and the resource users.

The second tier examines each of these variables in greater detail, such as the government and non-government entities that may already be regulating the resource, the innate productivity of a resource system, the size and placement of the system, the system's economic value and what sorts of people use the resource -- from indigenous people to heads of state.

The third tier digs even deeper into each of the basic variables.

Ostrom said application of the framework would encourage policymakers to first examine the behaviours of resource users; then establish incentives for resource users to aid a conservation strategy or, at least, not interfere with it.

The framework could also serve to normalize the effects of political upheavals that occur regularly at both national and state/provincial levels, she said, adding that it could also accommodate non-political changes that might come with economic development and environmental change.

“In short, the framework's flexibility would allow the resource managers to modify a plan without scrapping the plan entirely,” Ostrom wrote in her study.

Ostrom edited the special issue with Arizona State University's Macro Janssen and John Anderies. (With inputs from ANI)