Abstract
Private standards, including ecolabels, have been posed as a governance solution for the global fisheries crisis. The conventional logic is that ecolabels meet consumer demand for certified “sustainable” seafood, with “good” players rewarded with price premiums or market share and “bad” players punished by reduced sales. Empirically, however, in the markets where ecolabeling has taken hold, retailers and brands—rather than consumers—are demanding sustainable sourcing, to build and protect their reputation. The aim of this paper is to devise a more accurate logic for understanding the sustainable seafood movement, using a qualitative literature review and reflection on our previous research. We find that replacing the consumer-driven logic with a retailer/brand-driven logic does not go far enough in making research into the sustainable seafood movement more useful. Governance is a “concert” and cannot be adequately explained through individual actor groups. We propose a new logic going beyond consumer- or retailer/brand-driven models, and call on researchers to build on the partial pictures given by studies on prices and willingness-to-pay, investigating more fully the motivations of actors in the sustainable seafood movement, and considering audience beyond the direct consumption of the product in question.
Highlights
With seafood being the most highly traded food globally and per capita consumption increasing more rapidly than other animal proteins, wild capture fisheries face real and imminent environmental limits
Are consumers really unimportant in the sustainable seafood movement? To whom are environmental non-government organization (ENGO) doing the naming and shaming? Retailers and brands are concerned about their reputation with whom? We find that consumers play a role as audience for ENGOs’ naming and shaming performances, which pushes brands/retailers to pursue sustainable procurement strategies
Some of the insights gained from these approaches that consider governance as arising from the interaction among actors include the following: (a) power relations are key to the capacity of players to drive sustainability initiatives [57,64,65]; (b) the alignment of business interests along the supply chain enables sustainability initiatives while misalignment obstructs [31,43,66]; (c) ecolabelling has had the effect of disadvantaging smaller producers, especially the poor in the global South [6,67,68,69]; (d) evaluating the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities is an important new research frontier [56,68,70]; and (e) ecolabels alone are not enough to address the sustainability challenges brought about by global industrial production [71]
Summary
With seafood being the most highly traded food globally and per capita consumption increasing more rapidly than other animal proteins, wild capture fisheries face real and imminent environmental limits. Since it emerged in the late 1990s, the sustainable seafood movement has been characterised by constellations of actors tackling issues of sustainable production and consumption It is one part of the broader environmental movement and consists of organisations seeking to conserve fisheries and marine ecosystems primarily through the use of market-based approaches. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the logic driving the sustainable seafood movement is best characterised as a “governance concert” with the audience made up of various stakeholders, including consumers as one important group. We narrowed each search by combining terms specific to marine resource management (seafood, fisheries, fish, overfishing, aquaculture), but this restriction reduced the pool of literature too far so we included papers not about seafood. We triangulated these themes against findings in our empirical work on the tuna industry, “grey literature” reports, media articles and web page statements by relevant organizations
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