Becoming entangled: Producing marine protected areas through Dolphin-Fisher relations in Southern India

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are widely used for biodiversity conservation through spatially defined zones that regulate human activity. While contemporary practices increasingly emphasise flexible, participatory, and adaptive governance, they continue to rely on area-based approaches that seek to regulate ecological processes through territorial management. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park in southern India, the paper examines how conservation is experienced and operationalised in marine environments where species move, fishing practices shift, and conservation authority extends beyond formally demarcated boundaries. Focusing on interactions between humpback dolphins, artisanal fishers, and state actors, the paper shows how dolphin depredation reorganises fishing locations, gear use and temporal rhythms, redistributing fishing effort across the seascape. Situating these interactions within broader transformations in fishing technology and ecological decline, it further demonstrates how state actors selectively prioritise species protection through surveillance and negotiated enforcement. The paper argues that marine conservation territories are produced not solely through fixed spatial exclusion, but through the interaction of dolphin mobility, fisher adaptations and governance practices, including territorial restrictions, species-based legal protections, surveillance practices, and negotiated enforcement. Conservation effects, therefore, emerge beyond the protected area boundaries through the interaction of ecological processes and governance practices rather than territorial regulation alone. In doing so, the paper reconceptualises MPAs as dynamic conservation spaces continually produced through multispecies interactions and everyday governance.