Sensing a Changing Tide: Community‐Based Monitoring and Collaborative Governance in Mexico’s Small‐Scale Fisheries

This article examines how small-scale fishing cooperatives on Mexico’s northern Pacific coast integrate technologies into community-based marine governance. Drawing on ethnographic research with cooperatives in Baja California Sur, it asks how oceanographic sensors are used, adapted, and made meaningful in citizen science and co-constructed governance practices, and what that reveals about empowerment and blue justice in coastal communities. Sensors enable cooperative members, particularly the cooperatives’ technical experts, to assess oceanographic conditions, better understand phenomena like harmful algal blooms and hypoxia, and make collective decisions about fishing practices and management of fishing areas. These technologies do not operate in isolation but complement existing community monitoring systems and embodied knowledge of the ocean, supporting deliberation that draws on plural forms of knowledge. We also describe the challenges, material and less tangible, that the cooperatives encounter, from lost equipment to the limits of translating local data into regulatory influence. Considering these developments through citizen science and blue justice, the article shows how co-constructed monitoring infrastructures supported by scientists and civil society organizations open new avenues for community epistemic agency, support locally led knowledge production and adaptive management, and unsettle persistent inequalities in whose knowledge counts. It therefore contributes to debates on participatory environmental governance in small-scale fisheries and its limits in uneven ocean governance regimes.