Against the backdrop of a community-based fishery management institution called kadakkodi, this paper addresses the question of how institutions evolve, innovate, or disintegrate. It explains how institutional evolution is determined by factors like relative resource endowment, technology, cultural endowment, and inherited institutional structures. The strength of such informal institutions in facilitating effective resource management admitted, the paper argues that in the wake of increasing resource-related, technological, cultural and institutional heterogeneities, they may fail to perform and hence are no panacea to the problems of resource management. Such predicaments may call for complementary formal institutions whose supply, however, would depend on the cost of collective action.