The paper discusses the application of Elinor Ostrom’s Social Ecological Systems (SES) framework, using as example a community organization in Costa Rica, which collectively extracts turtle eggs. The paper does so with the particular aim of examining the coevolving relationship between political science and economics. The SES framework is understood as a useful exploratory tool, which was introduced into a joint research agenda from a political science perspective. The breadth of its approach enables it to capture empirically observable diversity. In this sense it provided a perfect complement to the more partial view that economics brought into the coevolving research process.