*4.3.3 Recognising regulations' real functions: their advantages and disadvantages*

In all our case studies where the MPA has as its disposal a legal arsenal, prioritising regulations and their different uses is part of the normal functioning of an MPA that attempts an effectiveness that is impossible to envisage if dialogue with certain stakeholders breaks down. However, this is not without risk. In addition to the possibility of the illegal use of the regulation, its use as a medium for negotiation gives rise to unequal treatment at the expense of populations with the lowest social capital. Indeed, on the one hand, the effort the MPA must make to enforce a rule is all the more considerable since the offenders have social capital that allows them to curb its application, and on the other hand, this social capital facilitates negotiation: consequently, the rules are often applied differently depending on the public concerned. In Colombia, for example, in the RSBCNNP, islanders are banned from erecting artificial defences on the foreshore to protect themselves from coastal erosion. However, while the rule is enforced for local afro-descendant communities, it is enforced far less strictly for holiday homes and tourist enterprises (this is easily observed in the landscape), which travel to Cartagena to engage in dialogue with an administration whose language and logics they understand. This is the source of a sense of injustice, which is sometimes expressed with violence, as in the case when the NNP's premises were vandalised on San Bernardo in 2018. The differentiated application of the rule is primarily the result of a differential of social capital from one public to another. It is crucial to acknowledge the reality of how these legal regulations are used, as much to counter the "regulatory illusion" as to control the eventual negative effects of these uses.
