In the best-selling novel Catch-22, set in Italy in World War II, Captain John Yossarian has a problem. He doesn't want to fly any more combat missions because, he says, people are trying to kill him—which they are. So he requests a psychiatric evaluation to declare him unfit to fly. But since only a sane person would not want to fly a combat mission, anyone requesting such an evaluation would, in fact, be fit to fly. This, now well-known, type of situation is called a catch 22.

In Life, Fish and Mangroves: Resource Governance in Coastal Cambodia, Melissa Marschke uses catch 22 to describe a situation that is probably more common in conservation and resource governance than we'd like to believe. In Chrouy Pros Bay the resource management committees have the authority, given to them by the Department of Fisheries, to patrol the Bay to spot and confront illegal trawling. However, they must have a police officer or a technical officer of the Department with them. But the police aren't interested, and the Fisheries department doesn't have the capacity to send a technical officer. The resource committees have a mandate to patrol but of course are not allowed to patrol—catch 22.

Life, Fish and Mangroves is a decade-long research endeavour by Marschke, showcasing her attempt to understand (1) how livelihoods shift, evolve and adapt in resource-dependent coastal communities in Cambodia, (2) the role of decentralized resource governance in such situations, and (3) the potential for multiple forms of governance in situations where decline of resources has severe livelihood implications. Such questions are clearly important in a context such as Cambodia, a country ranked 139 on the Human Development Index and where an estimated 75% of all protein consumed in rural areas comes from fish. Add to this dependence the suggestion that most coastal and freshwater fisheries in Cambodia are already overfished (Pomeroy et al., 2007, Marine Policy. 31, 645–656; Salayo et al., 2008, Marine Policy, 32, 692–700.), and we have a clear call for sustainable fisheries governance as soon as possible.

Decentralization of resource governance, which has swept the developing world in the past 2 decades, holds for fisheries in Cambodia as well. As Marschke relates to us, in the early 1990s only a handful of community fisheries existed and now there are well over 450. Throughout the book we learn about this history, the power struggles, and some of the contributing factors providing communities with rights, as well as some of the factors impeding successes. With no surprises, capacity and corruption issues loom large, the latter being driven by financial and political interests in mining and industrial fishing extraction.

In the beginning of the book Marschke takes us through a review of natural resource governance in Cambodia and some general resource governance for social science theory. Now I'll admit I am both biased by, and enamoured with, quantitative data. So I could do without the ‘As Nietzsche notes, “one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity.” ’ In fact I could do without the word rich in all social science unless it is describing wealthy people, and I like Nietzsche, he was funny. But Marschke's effort is not quantitative, so while I struggled with the first few chapters and the focus on social theory, qualitative approach and the political ecology, I found the case study in Koh Sralao absorbing.

In taking us into the households of six different families, Marschke paints a great picture of what has happened in the community over time with respect to the state, importance and management of the fishery upon which the community depends. While many people came to the area to work in the marijuana fields, they stayed and adapted their livelihood strategies once the government shut this option down. The case study here reiterates much of what the world learned from Elinor Ostrom and colleagues, that local natural resource governance requires strong leaders, and long-term relationships with technical and political allies (and some national publicity helps too).

This is not a story where everything turns out rosy. This story is ongoing and both the local resource management committee and local fishers are struggling to overcome impediments at local, regional and national levels. Marschke deftly points out that fisheries are hard to manage under the best of conditions. We can look to the salmon, lobster and cod fisheries of the north Atlantic and numbly nod in agreement. In Koh Sralao people are dealing with industrial trawlers, mining companies, increasing food prices, vested political interests and extreme poverty. Yet, by focusing on goals that are cost-effective, non-political, and where success is easy to demonstrate, the local resource governance committees have made some headway towards more effective management of the resource upon which their livelihoods depend—despite the catch 22s.