The Instituto del Bien Común considers the tradition and various institutions of common tenure and management of natural and cultural resources, services and spaces as the constitutive elements for a platform for sustainable development; that is, to defeat poverty while conserving the quality of the environment for present and future generations of women and men. This concept is usually denied by those who see the relationship of man to nature from an extreme mercantile perspective and have a purely utilitarian and egocentric understanding of economy. IBC deems a balanced relationship between private and public interests as the foundation for sustainable development of a social community. Harmonious dialogue between private rights and collective rights is indispensable in any humanist social project.

Finding ourselves in a historical period of peremptory challenges worldwide, IBC is concerned that common properties and their appropriate management are extremely neglected in the thinking and actions of public organisms and Peruvian civil society.  Furthermore, we are concerned by the fact that, along with the subjugation of other fundamental values, collective action to resolve common problems has been falling into disuse. For example, the phenomenon of "El Niño" in 1997-1998, whose predicted appearance demanded the entire population's collective response encouraged by public authorities, was met instead by less effective individual responses marked by an absence of the institutionality required for communal actions.

What is certain is that very serious challenges exist.  It is necessary to mold the concept of citizenship of every Peruvian—governing or governed—in a culture of rights and responsibilities regarding common properties. The market imposes multiple pressures on commonly held natural and cultural resources, services and spaces as well as on the human groups who manage them. In this country there are serious difficulties in the management of common properties, and this is due in part to confusion with regard to who exercises authority in the context of the commons and in part because, among the groups of common owners, new individual interests have been arising within the framework of the world economy, along with a social differentiation that conditions their capacity for collective management.

In this situation, the challenge for IBC is to contribute to better understanding the dynamic relation between the common good and the good of the individual in order to seek solutions to the practical problems of the management and economy of common resources, services and spaces and to contribute to the creation of a civic consciousness of the vital importance of these for individual security and wellbeing and for the identity and sustainable development of the country as a whole.

The IBC proposal recognizes that systems of life are interconnected in such a way that the management of territory and mode of production on one part of the planet has an influence on the environment of other regions and countries. It also recognizes that there is a delicate balance between the quality of life of human communities and those of other animal, vegetal and microbiological species.  The Earth is a physical and biological system that must be carefully managed for its conservation and continuity. This interconnection is made more evident when specific regions are studied such as a particular river basin or ecosystem.

The common wellbeing requires two types of agreements or contracts in the Rousseau an sense: a social contract that harmoniously counterbalances the common welfare and individual liberty and an ecological contract that counterbalances the environmental quality of the planet with the desire and the social and individual performance of people, that is, of tenure and management of resources and natural spaces for—all at the same time—human socioeconomic development and the protection of ecosystems and continuity through time of the important services these provide.

It is the most apparent and general function of governments at all levels to negotiate these contracts with their citizens and teach them about the rights and obligations that they propose to them, as well as ensuring their compliance.

To achieve the appropriate balance between private common properties and private individual properties it is indispensable for every citizen to become aware that both forms of property play an essential role in socioeconomic development and exercise his or her rights and fulfill his or her obligations in respect to them.