Collective management of resources has enjoyed a remarkable rise to prominence across resource governance, but many questions remain. What benefits are created and who are the recipients? Are these benefits and incentives sufficient to enable communities to collaborate for longer-term management? A clear conceptual framework is needed to better understand these social, economic and environmental impacts. The paper responds to this need and presents a new tool to analyse benefits and benefit-sharing within and between communities in relation to poverty reduction and conservation through two cases of community fisheries management in Lower Mekong Basin. The paper starts by drawing together current understanding of benefit-sharing and its relevance to community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) before continuing with description and analysis of the two selected case studies of Savannakhet Province in Laos and Tra Vinh Province in Vietnam. The lessons from these two cases for promoting benefit-sharing by the state, market and civil society are then discussed in relation to resource governance and broader community development. The two cases show varying degrees of sophistication and success in terms of benefits’ flow and distribution. They illustrate the diversity of social settings within Lower Mekong Basin and demonstrate that the task of ensuring that there is a balance of benefit sharing in the collective resource management while at the same time expanding and replicating this model is a difficult one. Benefit-sharing analysis offers an important tool for strengthening collective management and captures all the possible and latent gains in the resource governance. Division of benefit flow and distribution allows a definite understanding of what type of interventions would be needed, by whom and where should they be placed if CBNRM were to be further promoted as a way of addressing poverty eradication and biodiversity conservation. This concept is principally helpful for NGOs and development agencies if they want to work with the state and market actors to advocate for more accountable, inclusive and equitable resource governance. The challenge remains to address and capitalise upon the diversity and complexity of the conditions influencing benefit-sharing.