Coastal lagoons are important ecosystems that are highly threatened worldwide. By analyzing the Mallorquin Lagoon (ML) in northern Colombia, we assess whether community involvement is enough to combat ecosystem degradation. To achieve this goal, we employed a mixed-methods approach that combined sequential explanatory techniques, including multi-temporal analysis, a choice experiment, and a focus group. After gathering empirical data, we answer that community participation is not enough to tackle the degradation faced by ML. We argue that for being enough, community participation should be both necessary and sufficient, and in our case, it met the former criteria, but not the latter. We contend that for community participation to be enough, it should move from instrumental community agency to political agency, which represents a direct challenge to social structures that perpetuate the ML's degradation. With this move, besides being necessary, participation will also meet the criteria for being sufficient.