Same Rules, Different Relations: Sub-District Variation in the Relational Foundations of Collaborative Seaweed Aquaculture Governance in Nunukan, Indonesia

Abstract

Collaborative environmental governance (CEG) treats social learning, mutual trust, and knowledge co-production as mutually reinforcing relational foundations of collective action. Whether these dimensions in fact move together where formal collaborative institutions are weak remains poorly evidenced, particularly in tropical small-scale aquaculture. This article examines the relational foundations of state supervision in one of Indonesia’s largest seaweed-producing frontiers, Nunukan Regency on the Indonesia–Malaysia border, where 4,770 fishing households cultivate some 13,050 ha. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 62 informants across three coastal sub-districts and four administrative tiers, supplemented by document review, we combine within-case comparison with systematic quantitizing of coded responses. Three findings stand out. First, the three dimensions are decoupled rather than mutually reinforcing: trust among seaweed farmers remains robust, while collective learning and knowledge co-production are largely absent and 60% of field actors report low or no trust in local government. Second, actor category does not predict relational configuration. The same occupational triad — seaweed farmers, seaweed scavengers (pemukat), and capture fishers — produces economic symbiosis in one sub-district, latent conflict in a second, and native–settler antagonism in a third, under an identical formal framework. Local institutional density, not occupational identity, structures trust. Third, the technical regulations governing the sector are known to fewer than 2% of informants, a regulation-on-paper condition that forecloses evidence-based supervision. We argue that uniform, regency-wide collaborative interventions are therefore unlikely to succeed, and that institutional bridging with existing informal coordinators is a more plausible pathway than substituting them with formal structures.