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The article aims to study the management principles governing the Valdes Peninsula Protected Area (Argentina). It is part of the critical literature on the theories and practices of participation that have characterized conservation over the past thirty years. Based on the case study of the management plan revision of the protected area, the article shows how power relations between stakeholders —such as fishers, local administrators and fisheries biologists— and the state are reproduced and amplified by participatory tools that show a lack of reflexivity. The hierarchy drawn up by the provincial government between knowledge resulting from different activities —e.g. research and fishing— remains untouched and decision-making power is in no way shared among participants. Whilst the government views researchers as experts, it involves fishers, in what are referred to as participatory processes, only as ‘stakeholders’. Fishers are acknowledged a role, though minor, in conservation only through the ‘tactics’ (Certeau, 1984) worked out by some biologists who collaborate with them. However, the fishers’ knowledge remains ‘subjugated’ (Foucault, 1980) and is never considered as expert knowledge (Choy, 2005) by the government in charge of the protected area.