Fishing agreements are a collaborative management tool that has been adopted in the Lower Amazon since the end of the last century. To establish and maintain theses agreements generates costs – the transaction costs. High costs can discourage resource users and other stakeholders to collaborate for the agreement, especially if the State does not accomplish its role. Pirarucu (Arapaima spp.) has biological, ecological, and economic characteristics that facilitate and encourage its co-management, in which the expected benefits can outweigh the generated costs. In this sense, this study aimed to identify the main factors that influence the performance of the pirarucu co-management system, based on the evaluation of the benefits and transaction costs of the referred systems in floodplain communities, located in the municipalities of Santarém and Alenquer, in Pará state. Field research was carried out in the following communities: Água Preta, Pixuna, Santa Maria do Tapará and Tapará-Miri, in the municipality of Santarém and, Salvação and Urucurituba, in the municipality of Alenquer. The data were collected through interviews, observation, monitoring of fishing in general, and the production of pirarucu, forms application, and secondary data survey. The results indicate that although there is a perception of the positive results of the co-management of pirarucu, the transaction costs are high, especially due to the investment in resource enforcement, discouraging some groups of managers. It is necessary a high level of social capital, trust networks, to overcome the collective dilemma of overfishing, since the scenario of fisheries management in the Lower Amazon is characterized by the weak participation of the state in co-management. Communities that had well-managed stocks of pirarucu have been developing sustainable use activities since 2000. These received technical support during the Várzea Project, coordinated by 'IPAM', whose financing ended in 2013. On the other hand, communities in which the pirarucu co-management is still weak started later, in 2009, close to the end of external financing. Despite the technical support for the management of pirarucu in the Lower Amazon had returned in 2015 carried out by Sapopema, the transition caused actions' discontinuity, which most strongly affected the last group of communities. NGOs helped users, especially in the initial phases, to build social institutions focused on the co-management of pirarucu. If there was greater participation by the State, the initiatives could be multiplied and expanded. Studies on the management of pirarucu that integrate the social and economic analysis, in addition to the biological and ecological, are necessary to understand more widely the bottlenecks and possibilities of fisheries sustainable use and to subsidize policies for fisheries management in the Amazon.
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