ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on three meetings of the Scrubfield Marine Reserve Committee (SMRC), characterising some of the issues underlying members' disagreements with their executive, the staff from the Department of Marine Management (DOMM). The first two of SMRC's meetings had been largely introductory; they included information about the purpose and proposed staging of the planning process, the roles of the committee and the executive, presentations by a range of government, private and community 'stakeholders', and instructions to the committee members as to how to act. The planning model imposed by DOMM reflected its institutional inheritance as an agency dominated by scientists and governed by scientific conventions. DOMM staff and SMRC members gave various meanings to their interactions, resulting in ongoing tension and misunderstanding between them. Institutional habits and constraints, of the bureaucrats and the stakeholders, resulted in identifiable dissatisfactions which, eventually, led to the withdrawal of some members' support, threatening the whole project.
