The Coastal Resource Management Project (CRMP), jointly sponsored by USAID and the Philippine government, is one of many such projects in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia following growing realization that resource overexploitation and environmental degradation have complex social, economic, and political origins. The basic approach entails higher levels of government providing the regulatory and infrastructural capabilities that local fishing communities lack, while the communities’ fishers contribute their greater local knowledge to management initiatives and mobilize one another in support of those initiatives (Russell and Alexander 2000, p. 36). However, a recent review of community-based Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the Philippines and elsewhere found that social and economic conditions such as poverty and lack of political will hinder implementation of the broader management policies