Nayarit (Mexico) has been identified as a hotspot for climate change, showing faster warming of the coastal sea-surface temperature than 90 percent of the coastal areas in the world. Understanding how fishing communities are responding to climate change impacts in hotspots like Nayarit, and identifying what drives their responses, can be useful to create strategies ensuring the livelihoods of small–scale fishers in other regions of the world. Here we use a database of 445 fishers to investigate how fishers in Nayarit are organised socially, if patron-client relationships influence fishers’ adaptive capacity, and their responses to climate change. The fishers were grouped into one of three types of social organisation: independent, cooperative and patron-client, and their adaptive capacities calculated. Both were used to identify potential drivers of the fishers’ responses to climate change. Fishers in patron-client relationships were found to have differing scores of adaptive capacity across the domains (lower assets and agency) and respond differently to climate change than fishers that worked independently (more likely to engage in illegal fishing and borrowing money), potentially reinforcing their lower autonomy. Partially driven potentially by the lack of access to permits in Nayarit, creating a power imbalance between those with and without.
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