Several laws and institutions aiming to protect natural resources impose new restrictions and obligations to certain professionals. If, as citizens, these professionals need to comply with the laws, they can also - and often do - contest them. For the dialogical perspective of social representations and rhetoric psychology, this means that institutional-Others are requiring these professionals –the Self (collective or individual) - to change as a condition to become good or valued “ecological citizens”. Consequently contestation places them in a dilemmatic situation: how to remain in the realm of (good) citizenship while legitimately contesting what makes them citizens (their institutions and laws). This article examines how professional artisanal fishers from a Portuguese Natura 2000 protected site deal with this dilemma. Specifically, we examine how they use Reported Speech - in which the institutional Other is directly quoted in the discourse of the Self – for dealing with it. Extracts organized around instances of Reported Speech were identified in interviews (n=11) and 3 focus groups (n=13). In these extracts, we explore how Reported speech is used for giving “out-thereness” and credibility to re-presentations of the institutional-Other, the Self, and their relations; we also examine the explicit and implicit representations that are drawn from the dilemmatic reservoir of citizenship for grounding the arguments the interviewees use. We show how they manage to present their institutions as an authoritarian Other breaching the imperatives of democratic citizenship in their relation with the Self, who is in turn depicted as a good citizen, even if only rarely as a good ecological citizen.

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