Migrants to the Coasts: Livelihood, Resource Management, and Global Change in the Philippines

This case study explores how conflicting global pressures to exploit and to conserve the fish and other resources of coastal Southeast Asia play out in a series of communities in the coastal zone of Palawan Island in the Philippines, where the residents' livelihoods depend on fishing. The account considers a government program to relieve fishing pressures by establishing marine protected areas and creating "alternative livelihoods," and shows how ethnicity, gender, and evangelical religious conversion each figure in changing household economic strategies and other local efforts to cope with relentless global forces.