In order to provide a guiding structure to the workshop, as well as achieve the Objectives with the workshop, four themes were identified. The selected themes should be understood as a way of operationalizing the objectives and making them more concrete. While closely related, as well as overlapping, the themes are, at the same time, focusing on issues that are distinct enough to warrant separate treatment. Taken together, they form an overall conceptual framework for how community-based natural resource management was presented and analyzed at the workshop.

The themes structured the overall workshop, including the Plenaries and the Case Studies, in the following way: Four of the plenary presentations each addressed one of the four themes, and thus presented a framework for the set of case studies that addressed each theme. The themes are:

THEME 1 The Process of Establishing an Enabling Policy and Institutional Environment. This process takes place at both the macro and micro levels, and fosters the emergence of community-based institutions to manage natural resources locally. This theme includes the establishment or codification of well-defined property rights and responsibilities - whether state, individual, or common - with respect to natural resources.

THEME 2 The Participatory Process of Organizing Effective Community-Based Groups. This process, operating on a large scale, contributes to community-based groups effectively managing their natural resources locally. This theme includes the role of catalytic organizations, such as regional and local governments and non-governmental organizations.

THEME 3 Effective Operational Linkages Between the Public Sector, the Private Sector, and Community-Based Groups in the Management of Natural Resources. Such linkages will, in a formal sense, be established between the government (located on national, regional, or local levels) and community-based groups in the management of natural resources. This theme includes fiscal arrangements between governments and communities, institutional arrangements to make governments more client-responsive, and monitoring and evaluating the impacts of new institutional arrangements.

THEME 4 Alternative Approaches to Conflict Management in the use of Natural Resources. Such approaches are addressing conflicts found at all levels, including the local, regional, national, and international levels, including conflicts within and between communities and between various levels in the management of a natural resource, such as a river system, and between nations. This theme, and the papers presented under it, were developed in collaboration with the International Development Research Centre (see Follow-Up).