To involve interested members of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) network and bring in different experiences, a CROP/MOST competition has been organised on the topic of poverty reduction and best practices. What does "best practice" in relation to a certain kind of poverty reduction mean, and how can the context in which the best practice works be described and analysed.  The first Prize was shared between Anuradha Joshi, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and Mick Moore, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Britain, for their paper îEnabling Environments, Social Capital, and Effective Anti-poverty Programmesî, and Mohammed Shafi, Department of Geography, Aligarh Muslim University, India, for his paper îBest Practices in Poverty Reduction and Management of Social Transformation.î Each paper was honoured with USD 750 and a travel grant to the joint CROP/ISSC/MOST workshop on "Best Practices in Poverty Reduction" in Amman, Jordan, 10 November 1999. Both the papers were presented at this workshop.  The 1st prize was shared between 2 very different approaches. One is a theoretical approach where the predictability of the bureaucracy plays an important role in the success of an anti-poverty intervention, applied to cases in Nepal and India. The other approach outlines a set of identifiable anti-poverty strategies, setting out the target for the anti-poverty intervention and discussing its potential for replication.  Although there were several interesting papers no 3rd prize was awarded. The major reason for this was the lack of a more theoretical analysis of îbest practicesî as a phenomenon beyond the concrete cases presented. For further information please contact the CROP Secretariat: CROP Secretariat  Fosswinckelsgate 7  N-5007 Bergen  Norway  Tel: +47 55 58 97 39  Fax: +47 55 58 97 45  E-mail: crop@uib.no

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