The Philippines archipelago is an important centre of tropical coastal marine biodiversity. Since the 1970s, various national and international actors have popularised marine protected areas (MPAs) as an effective tool for coastal conservation, tourism and even social empowerment. Scholars and practitioners however, overlook the different actors and complex institutions that frame and contest MPA design, implementation and outcomes. Pursuing apolitical perspectives and strategies in MPA governance and management, in turn, lead to continued environmental destruction and impoverished small-scale fishers. This paper describes the resources, power and relationship of key actors in MPA decision-making in four sites in northeastern Iloilo Province, Philippines. The paper explains that state-led, community-based and co-managed MPAs in the case study sites are socially constructed and contested. In such MPA spaces, actors have complex negotiations that have diverse and uncertain socio-political and ecological results. It is argued, however, that unless state and non-state actors link improved coastal ecosystem management, effective MPA governance and opportunities to enhance local livelihoods, then existing institutional arrangements will unlikely promote social justice and equity. In addition the major ecological effects of the Solar 1-Petron oil spill of August, 2006 are described and the potential implications of the disaster to the institutional resilience of MPA management systems are evaluated.