In 1993 a study of coastal villages in Vanuatu revealed that within the previous three years there had been a rapid increase in marine resource management (MRM) activities. The initial impetus for these events was the Vanuatu Fisheries Department’s promotion of a voluntary, village-based trochus management programme. Initially the programme involved only a few fishing villages out of a total of several hundred. The Department surveyed their community trochus stocks, advised the people that regular several-year closures of their trochus fishery, followed by brief openings, would generate far more profit than the usual practice of harvesting continually. They left it to the villagers to decide whether or not to act on this advice. The 1993 study revealed that villages that followed this advice found it so profitable that other villages quickly followed suit. Moreover, seeing what conservation could do for their trochus stocks, many villages decided to implement their own conservation measures to protect other marine animals, including finfishes, lobsters, clams, beche-de-mer (sea cucumbers) and crabs, as well as to ban or restrict certain harmful fishing practices such as night spearfishing and the use of nets, especially gill nets. One of the surveyed villages set up a marine protected area and stocked it with giant clams. 21 of the villages surveyed in 1993 were resurveyed in 2001 to determine how successful these community initiated management measures had been in the eyes of the villagers. This was done by determining how many MRM measures had lapsed and how many new ones had been initiated. Results revealed that village-based MRM measures had more than doubled between 1993 and 2001. In addition to the fisheries department, a potent source of motivation for village-based MRM that emerged in 1995 was the locally renowned travelling theatre group called Wan Smolbag (WSB) which featured the plight of sea turtles resulting in the villagers working towards turtle conservation.