| This dissertation is a result of sixteen months of participant-observation in the Loreto Bay National Park in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and analyzes the national park's relationship with local fishing communities and its role in allocating scarce resources, both natural and social. The fishing communities around Loreto are the focus of most of the thesis, including the fishermen's response to the park and the efforts of a local women's cooperative to increase their families' incomes. The creation of the national park in 1996, which includes the waters and islands used by fishermen, tourism, and others, threatened access to local natural resources. The process of creating and managing the marine park and access to its resources revealed the importance of social networks and information about local and national bureaucracies.; Drawing on theories about how institutions function and the framework of distributed cognition, I argue that understanding decision-making requires an in-depth analysis of the basic terrain of institutional constraints on individual action, and the ways relationships can mitigate or amplify these limitations. Understanding how people, both individually and collectively, interact with institutions in order to gain access to resources, helps us to see how they are able to survive in a social context that is sometimes hostile to their personal interests In addition, this case study also explores how organizational and institutional structures constrain decision-making by presenting certain courses of action, and obscuring others.; The experiences of the marine park staff and others suggest how institutional constraints can be circumnavigated by using alternative social networks and institutional frames, and how these become heuristics for use in future decisions. Within the context of fishing scarcity, an absence of economic development, and political maneuvering, the people involved in Loreto's resource debates, including the marine park staff, can be understood to be moving through complex and shifting sets of social relations, for which they must find and use of institutional and personal influences in a search for satisfactory solutions to complex problems of resource access. |
