Political making of more-than-fishers through their involvement in ecological monitoring of protected areas

One strategy for ecological monitoring of protected areas involves data collection by local resource users instead of external scientists. Growing support for such programs comes from their potential to both reduce costs and influence how resource users perceive and support protected areas, but their effects on participants are only beginning to be understood. We contribute to this growing research area through an in-depth study of how participants, their close kin, and their peers perceived the individual and community-wide effects of an ecological monitoring program. We examined the case of fishers’ involvement in ecological monitoring of a marine protected area network in Baja California Sur, Mexico, organized since 2012 by the Mexican non-governmental organization Niparajá. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation in 2016 and 2017, we found that the most salient effect of the program was personal growth. Participants described becoming “more than a fisher” through newly gained civic and environmental awareness, ecological knowledge, and self-confidence in public speaking skills. Respondents also identified health risks from diving and emotional burdens on participants’ families. Overall, other resource users in their communities seem to be supportive through reputational benefits of participants. These effects overlap with but seem more extensive than those documented in other citizen science programs. Environmentality provides a suitable explanation of the processes at play, where the act of monitoring is far more than data collection, intertwining participants’ fortunes (for better or worse) with the political fate of the protected area network itself.