A workshop was organised in March 2004 to draw lessons in community participation in the governance of coastal resources and to identify options to improve current practice. The workshop went through the following sequence of activities/topics. First was a levelling off among the participants on the governance concepts in CBCRM. This was followed by activities that looked at different issues and challenges affecting community participation in governance/coastal resource management. The sets of issues were classified into four main areas: institutional arrangements, policy and legislation, enforcement and tenure/ community property rights. Lessons were drawn from the different experiences and summarized into a discussion on empowering communities to participate. Possible ways of addressing the issues and challenges were identified at the end of the workshop.