Replication data and code for "Cooperativism against the odds: What determines fishers' continued interest in establishing and maintaining self-organization when state incentives are gone?"

A large body of scholarship has hypothesized which local-level conditions are conducive to the emergence and persistence of self-organization among users of common-pool resources. However, these insights are derived largely from single or comparative case studies with limited external validity. Only a handful of large-N datasets, mostly in forestry settings, have been assembled to test these hypotheses at national or subnational scales. In this study, we use national census and fishing license data from Mexico to build a panel tracking whether 5,672 fishing communities establish and maintain a cooperative between 1990 and 2020, accounting for most cooperatives nationally. We estimate the odds a fishing community establishes and maintains a cooperative according to a set of local-level, pre-event social and geographic variables, largely during a period when state incentives to establish cooperatives are withdrawn (1992-2020). We find that fishing cooperatives are likelier to emerge and persist when located near fisheries resources, far from cities, in non-Indigenous communities, and within populations with high rates of primary school completion. Additionally, the share of migrants in a fishing community exhibits a U-shaped relationship with the odds of emergence and persistence. Notably, we observe no relationship concerning material wealth. This study illustrates how local-level conditions can represent national-level constraints for successful collective action in small-scale fisheries contexts.