Community participation in natural resource and environmental management has enjoyed decades of widespread recognition. Participatory approaches have been seen as ways to make scarce resources go further, and to make more people more accountable for environmental outcomes. Viability of participatory programmes has been challenged, however, by: increasing social mobility as a result of globalisation, economic development and migration, and the impact of this mobility on the integrity of local social networks and quality of local knowledge; marginalisation of potential participants in sustainable natural resource management from resource access and property rights; and limited capacity of state institutions to develop partnership-based approaches to natural resource management within territories where their influence is tenuous. Contributions to a symposium upon which the articles in this issue of Local Environment are based address such challenges through analyses of the experience of community-based management of forest, fishery, and groundwater resources in a variety of sub-Saharan African, and South and East Asian locations.