Traditional, local sea tenure arrangements or local systems for managing marine resource use have not been widely documented for Java, and the apparent absence of such institutions has often been explicitly noted. This paper attempts to explain this apparent lack of strong local resource management institutions for fisheries in Java by drawing on the study of one rapidly developing fishing community on Java’s south coast. The increasing presence of central government authority, coupled with a Javanese cultural tradition that does not include a strong tradition of sea fishing, may have contributed to the erosion of existing local institutions for managing access to fishery resources and prevented the development of strong, new local management institutions as an outcome of fisheries conflicts. It is argued that perhaps because of local people’s inability to restrict access to fishery resources, new, informal local institutions, based on Javanese cultural traditions, have evolved for redistributing the fish catch once it reaches shore.