Local perspectives and institutional bricolage around conservation and development: Sembrando Vida and the Maya Train in the Southern Yucatán Peninsula

Abstract Local socioenvironmental governance and socioenvironmental outcomes are shaped by the interaction between local institutions and global-national-regional governance frameworks. We employ the institutional bricolage (IB) framework to analyze local perspectives regarding conservation, development, local socio-political relations, control over lands, and policy outcomes, in the context of the Maya Train project and Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life) program, in the Southern Yucatán Peninsula. We used Q methodology to analyze the subjective foundations of local governance based on 50 interviews and subsequently conducted with 17 participants selected based on their regional knowledge, community leadership, and contrasting opinions. Our analysis delineated four distinctive local perspectives, which underpin ongoing institutional crafting. These, in turn, shape socioenvironmental governance and the outcomes of conservation and development interventions. Our findings challenge simplified narratives depicting rural communities as either resisting or embracing external interventions. Instead, they reveal dynamic, context-specific engagements, where actors selectively align with or contest external agendas to advance local objectives. Such negotiations often blend traditional norms and new institutional arrangements, yielding hybrid governance models. This study shows how IB operates as a strategic mode of agency within asymmetrical power structures. We illuminate how rural governance emerges through locally driven negotiations that blend consensus and divergence among discursive profiles, in turn underpinning hybrid institutions that defy top-down designs and rigid binaries.