First Movement: “Sustainable Seafood”

Sarah Schumann1

This is the first part of series entitled “The Case for Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing: A Symphony in Four Movements.”

Alliterative and feelgood, the phrase “sustainable seafood” is de rigeur in fisheries marketing. It is hard to imagine a time when these words had not yet been strung together, let alone become the ubiquitous marketing totem that they are today. And yet, for most of history, seafood was simply “seafood,” differentiated only by things that customers could judge with their own senses, such as appearance, taste, and price.

That began to change in the 1990s – specifically, in 1992, with the crash of the Atlantic cod population in Canada. Convinced that a global fisheries crisis was underway and that governments lacked the political will to address it (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008), activist organizations turned their attention to the marketplace as an arena for ocean conservation (Sutton & Wimpee, 2008; Iles, 2004; Howes, 2008). Translating concepts of fisheries management2 into marketplace tactics, these organizations produced an amalgam of seafood-related boycotts, ranking and rating systems, and certification and labeling systems that together constitute the “sustainable seafood” movement.

Despite their myriad identities and varying formats, these programs share a common premise that market-based approaches offer advantages that government-centered approaches cannot. Not only do they embrace a view that market approaches are more expedient than policy work, but also that such approaches are “more efficacious than governmental regulations, which [can be seen as] watered down as a result of having to strike compromises between different groups (Konefal, 2012).”

As “sustainable seafood” transitioned from a novel concept to a ubiquitous buzzword (Sutton & Wimpee, 2008), its marketplace approach become locked in as a dominant paradigm in conservation. By the late 1990s, major ocean funders like the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts had shifted the majority of their marine conservation funding to market-based approaches (Konefal, 2012). By 2006, market-based strategies had become the most prominent approach employed in marine conservation work (Konefal, 2012).

This shift to private sector action mirrored the mood of the era. The 1990s saw pervasive neoliberal restructuring in the retail food sector, which led to consolidation of business ownership in fewer hands and tighter competition within the sector as a whole (Konefal, 2012). These trends may have facilitated the sustainable seafood movement’s expansion by making it easier for activist organizations to target their pressure towards specific companies and by increasing companies’ desire to set themselves apart from the competition through added value propositions, such as selling differentiated seafood.

In the review that follows, we present a brief overview of the sustainable seafood movement’s scientific underpinnings, theory of change, and influence over marine conservation discourse and framings. We showcase three prominent campaigns representing the movement’s evolution and breadth: the Give Swordfish a Break boycott, the Marine Stewardship Council eco-label, and the Seafood Watch color-coded rating system. We discuss the limits of the sustainable seafood movement, with a focus on how this movement struggles to adequately incorporate broader ecosystem-level sustainability objectives.

Ultimately, we conclude that the sustainable seafood movement’s primary accomplishment has been to raise concern about the state of the world’s fisheries and to enlist consumers as activists in ocean conservation. However, we argue that the movement’s global ambitions and deep entrenchment in single-species fisheries management (SSFM) impose limits on its ability to achieve ecosystem-level goals at the optimal spatial scale. In subsequent articles in this issue, we propose that a second movement, the “local seafood movement,” offers opportunities to overcome these limits, if coupled with the sustainable seafood movement’s emphasis on the natural environment, by introducing a place-based framework for consumer activism that can be superimposed with elements of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM).

Constructing “sustainable seafood”

The “symbolic differentiation” of “sustainable” seafood from other seafood is what Bostrom and Klintman (2008) call the “front stage” of these campaigns. In order for sustainable seafood campaigns to mobilize consumers, they must convincingly make the case that: (a) fisheries have a problem; (b) consumers should care about this problem; (c) activist organizations have a solution to this problem; and (d) consumers themselves are indispensable to achieving this solution. Before consumers can take action, they have to internalize beliefs about both the state of the environment (that fish populations are in crisis) and beliefs about their own agency (that their purchasing decisions can have a negative or positive effect on these populations), while trusting the simplified information communicated by activist organizations through symbols such as ecolabels and ratings guides.

Vital to this effort is the deployment of verbal and visual cues to signal the differentiation of approved products in the marketplace and the use of marketing techniques to build consumer familiarity with these cues (Boots, 2008). The core of these messaging tactics, Bostrom and Klintman (2008) explain, is that “[s]omething has to be defined as green and something has to be defined as being located outside the green spectrum (sometimes explicitly as grey, black, risky, or unsustainable, or sometimes by not being mentioned at all).”

In contrast, the “back stage” of these movements includes the decision making that takes place “behind” recommendations to consumers (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008). For campaigns to be meaningful (and not just popular) they need to define what they mean by “sustainable” and identify explicit criteria that allow them to differentiate “sustainable” seafood from other seafood products (Boots, 2008). While a campaign’s “front stage” necessarily consists of “categorical and overly simplistic ecological messages” that consumers can readily grasp, its back stage is complex and deliberative, involving negotiation over facts and values among a broad range of expert actors (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008).

In their back stage, campaigns typically involve the development of principles and criteria that are codified, explicit, and written (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008). Ecolabel certification, for example, is the outcome of a rigorous assessment process that verifies a product’s compliance with a sustainability standard and a set of criteria established by a certifying program (Ward & Phillips, 2008). Buying guides and ratings, while not necessarily based on a certification or assessment process (Ward & Phillips, 2008), are nonetheless informed by specific, replicable criteria and decision-making processes. Once these criteria are established, movement leaders can then decide which products qualify as meriting differentiation in the marketplace.

For the most part, sustainable seafood campaigns have borrowed their “back stage” criteria from the scientific framework that we refer to throughout this publication as “single-species fisheries management” (SSFM). This framework will be discussed in greater detail in the “third movement,” in which we contrast it with the scientific thinking that underpins “ecosystem-based fisheries management” (EBFM).

This conceptual bifurcation of seafood into two distinct categories, with one morally superior to the other, is a notable outcome of the sustainable seafood movement in its own right, regardless of the movement’s other impacts. Even if a consumer who is exposed to sustainable seafood advocacy does not actually purchase any recommended products, it is likely that this exposure nonetheless influences the consumer’s understandings about fisheries. As Iles (2004) explains, sustainable seafood consumer campaigns “draw consumer attention to the need to reflect on seafood sustainability as a key purchasing variable, and direct consumers, if quite indirectly, to their biological, ecological, and fishery impacts, which they previously did not consider, and were not capable of speaking about.” These “discursive effects” are independent of the success that sustainable seafood campaigns may or may not have in meeting their stated economic or environmental objectives.

This “important discursive element” (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008)” is without doubt one of the most significant, yet underappreciated, impacts of the sustainable seafood movement to date. But whether this impact is positive or negative depends on one’s vantage point. Some observers accuse sustainable seafood consumer campaigns of selectively framing the factors that constitute “sustainability” and projecting a falsely definitive categorization of products that leaves little room for nuance. Below, we enumerate specific criticisms:

• Ward and Phillips (2008) allege that sustainable seafood eco-label campaigns falsely convey an impression that labeled products are inherently more sustainable than non-labeled products, when in fact, not all products have equal access to the voluntary process of seeking certification, which is expensive and precludes many smaller or less profitable fisheries from seeking certification.

• Iles (2004) finds fault with sustainable seafood campaigns because they “do not present their science as uncertain, evolving, or contested among scientists themselves. Instead, they portray fishery management science as if it is stable, well-understood, and based on extensive consensus, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.”

• Several authors (Leadbitter & Ward, 2007; Jacquet & Pauly, 2007; Pelletier & Tyedmers, 2008) allege that sustainable seafood campaigns largely fail to address socio-economic attributes such as food security, and that they disadvantage small-scale fisheries.

• Jacquet et al. (2009) observe that sustainable seafood campaigns tend to ignore life-cycle impacts of seafood products, such as emissions associated with harvest, processing, and transportation. Similarly, other authors note that sustainable seafood campaigns generally “overlook the full range of broader biophysical sustainability considerations that flow from the diverse range of industrial activities associated with the provision of wild-caught seafood products to consumers (Pelletier & Tyedmers, 2008)” and fail to take into account “the stability of the broader biogeochemical cycles that cumulatively provide the basis for healthy marine ecosystems (Jacquet et al., 2009).”

• Particularly relevant to this publication, Jacquet and Pauly (2007) assert that, “In an era where understanding that fishery management must be ecosystem-based is growing, the rhetoric of seafood campaigns based on a species-specific approach may represent a step backward.” As these authors allude, sustainable seafood campaigns tend to draw on scientific concepts and data associated with single-species fisheries management (SSFM), rather than the science of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM). We will come back to assertion later, both in the case study of the Marine Stewardship Council eco-label below and in the “fourth movement” of this series.

Theory of change

The purported power of sustainable seafood campaigns hinges on their ability to create “market pull” by establishing credible differentiation from competing products in the marketplace (Ward & Phillips, 2008). According to this theory of change, price premiums achieved for “sustainable” seafood can help internalize environmental externalities by providing a price incentive that covers the costs that producers incur when improving their environmental practices (Ward & Phillips, 2008), in turn enabling companies to shift more easily to practices recommended by environmental NGOs. In practice, not all eco-labeled fisheries have achieved a price premium, suggesting that there are also non-monetary benefits that induce seafood companies to seek or maintain certification. These may include, for example, a desire to enhance their public image and social license (van Putten et al., 2020).

While marketplace activism can be viewed as a substitute for government action where necessary, it can also be seen as a spur to government action where possible, acting as a precursor that models or paves the way for improvement in government regulation. As Boots (2008) notes, these campaigns’ “underpinning philosophy is that, over time, choice made in the open marketplace will influence the seafood industry and government regulators in favour of better conservation of ocean resources” (emphasis added). This strategy is illustrated by the fact that while movement leaders were developing sustainable seafood campaigns that could be implemented in the marketplace, they were simultaneously pursuing more stringent regulations to curb overfishing and reduce the impacts of mobile fishing gear on habitat. In the U.S. context, these efforts paid off with the by passage of the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Act.3

Similarly, Sutton and Wimpee (2008) note that “moving the market is only the first step towards improving the effectiveness of fishery management and ultimately the health of the oceans. One of the leading challenges for the sustainable seafood movement will be to move beyond commitments to change seafood sourcing policies to collaboration with industry to directly influence fishery management itself (emphasis added).” In Leadbitter’s (2008) words, “failure (partial or total) of supply-side catch constraints… does not mean that such constraints are valueless, but that demand-side controls may provide additional solutions. Used together, a more effective system can result (Leadbitter, 2008).”

Ultimately, whether exerting pressure through the marketplace or the management system, the success of the sustainable seafood campaigns must be measured in terms of their ability to reduce fisheries-induced harm—a metric that is considerably harder to measure than market penetration, consumer acceptance, and price effects (Ward, 2008b). Numerous articles have debated the environmental efficacy of sustainable seafood consumer campaigns over the last twenty years (e.g., Arton, 2020), but a full review of these debates is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, we turn out attention to three flagship campaigns that emblemize the movement’s influence strategies and messaging tactics.

Case Studies

1. “Give Swordfish a Break” Boycott

From 1960 and 1996, North Atlantic swordfish stocks declined by 68 percent while the average size of landed swordfish decreased by two-thirds (Sugarman, 1999). In response, the Natural Resources Defense Council and SeaWeb launched the Give Swordfish A Break campaign in 1998.

Partnering with seventeen high-profile chefs as opinion leaders, the two NGOs worked to make the swordfish issue visible to consumers, reporters, and ultimately, to policy makers. As a result of their efforts, over 700 chefs signed a pledge to avoid buying and selling swordfish in their restaurants until the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT, an international body of 27 countries that jointly manage highly migratory swordfish stocks) took action to rebuild swordfish populations. Although the NGOs’ objectives were policy-related, they leveraged the power of the marketplace to bring needed publicity and pressure to the issue.

This strategy paid off in intense media coverage, a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, a call by President Clinton for a ban on the sale of imported juvenile swordfish, and finally, a letter of support from 78 members of Congress. Ultimately, U.S. pressure led ICCAT to reduce the swordfish quota and close swordfish nursery areas to fishing in the year 2000. Within three years following this action, swordfish populations reached 94% of levels considered to be healthy (Boots, 2008).

A 1999 Washington Post survey found that a quarter of the chefs who had taken the no-swordfish pledge continued to serve swordfish despite the pledge (Sugarman, 1999), casting doubt on whether the campaign ever achieved any actual market pull. Nonetheless, evidencing the “important discursive element” described by Bostrom and Klintman (2008), Boots (2008) concluded that the Give Swordfish a Break campaign “successfully conditioned the policy and media climates to be receptive to an ocean conservation message.”

2. Marine Stewardship Council

Motivated by the Canadian cod collapse of 1992 and the mounting concern about global fishing pressure that transpired in its wake, the environmental NGO WWF and the global corporation Unilever met in 1995 to discuss a course of action. That meeting sowed the seeds for a new entity, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which would go on to launch the world’s most prominent seafood eco-label in 1997. The MSC’s mission is to “use our ecolabel and fishery certification program to contribute to the health of the world’s oceans by recognising and rewarding sustainable fishing practices, influencing the choices people make when buying seafood and working with our partners to transform the seafood market to a sustainable basis.”

The MSC worked with over 300 organizations and individuals worldwide over two years to develop the MSC Fisheries Standard. The standard is a diagnostic tool that the MSC uses to assess, certify, and, when appropriate, grant the use of its ecolabel to fisheries that meet its criteria for certification. The standard is based on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, and it embodies three principles: sustainable target fish stocks, environmental impact of fishing, and effective management. Fisheries that apply for certification and meet the MSC’s criteria are able “to claim that its fish come from a well-managed and sustainable source (MSC, 2018).”

To meet the “sustainable target fish stocks” portion of the standard (Principle 1), “a fishery must be conducted in a manner that does not lead to over-fishing or depletion of the exploited populations and, for those populations that are depleted, the fishery must be conducted in a manner that demonstrably leads to their recovery (MSC, 2018).” In general, determination of a fishery’s compliance with this portion of the standard is based on an evaluation of: a fishery’s stock status relative to its Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY)4 or Point of Recruitment Impairment5; presence of convincing evidence that rebuilding is occurring if the stock is depleted; presence of a robust and precautionary harvest strategy designed to meet stock management objectives; presence of well-defined harvest control rules; and existence of adequate programs to monitor stock status (MSC, 2018).

To meet the “environmental impact of fishing” portion of the standard (Principle 2), “fishing operations should allow for the maintenance of the structure, productivity, function and diversity of the ecosystem (including habitat and associated dependent and ecologically related species) on which the fishery depends (MSC, 2018).” For this portion of the standard, evaluators must take into account not only the stock status of the fishery seeking certification, but also: impacts of the fishery on any other species caught by the same fishing gear in the same areas and time; impacts of the fishery on endangered, threatened, or protected species; impacts of the fishery on habitat; and impacts of the fishery on ecosystem structure and function.

To meet the “effective management” portion of the standard (Principle 3), a fishery must be “subject to an effective management system that respects local, national and international laws and standards and incorporates institutional and operational frameworks that require use of the resource to be responsible and sustainable (MSC, 2018).” For this portion of the standard, evaluators consider a number of governance-related issues, such as whether the fishery seeking certification: exists within a legal and/or customary framework sufficient to assure long-term sustainability, resolve disputes, and reach long-term objectives that are in keeping with the MSC standard and the precautionary principle; is characterized by effective decision-making processes that result in measures and strategies to achieve its objectives; is characterized by adequate compliance with and enforcement of existing management measures; and is subject to effective and timely review of the fishery-specific management system.

The MSC’s certification process begins when a client representing a fishery seeking certification contacts an MSC-accredited independent certifier (a consultant called a Conformity Assessment Bodies, or CAB) to initiate an application for certification. This CAB then determines eligibility for certification by examining the fishery’s policies, processes, and outcomes and scoring them against 28 separate performance indicators associated with the three principles described above. The combined scores from this process determine whether a fishery qualifies to receive unconditional certification, conditional certification, or no certification.

Once a fishery receives certification, a business wishing to apply the MSC eco-label logo on product packaging must secure a license from the MSC. For a specific fishery product to exhibit the MSC logo, all companies in the supply chain that handle the product must be certified under the MSC Chain of Custody Standard, which guarantees traceability of the product from a certified sustainable source to the end consumer.

The theory of change behind the MSC’s system of certification and labeling is that by publicly celebrating the fishery products that meet its standards for sustainability, the eco-label will reward best practices and incentivize additional fisheries to make the necessary improvements to their operations and management system, so that they too can also receive the label. In this way, a shift in consumer preference for certified products is only an intermediary goal; the ultimate goal of MSC certification is to encourage fishing industry businesses to improve practices within their own fishery so that they too may enjoy the rewards of certification. The MSC estimates that 14% of global fisheries are currently MSC-certified. The MSC’s goal is to see one third of the world’s fisheries receive MSC certification by 2030 (www.msc.org).

3. Seafood Watch

The Seafood Watch program is a seafood advisory list launched by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1999, after a successful “Fishing for Solutions” exhibit led the Aquarium to develop an interest in helping consumers make more informed seafood choices. The list consists of a three-bin ranking system in which products from various fisheries are assigned one of three ranks: “best choice” (green), “good alternative” (yellow), and “avoid” (red). For the purposes of assessment and ranking, a “fishery” is defined as a combination of target species, country/region, water body, and gear type. Seafood Watch evaluates and ranks all of the most common seafood items available in the North American market, including both domestic and imported products. The advisory list is published as a wallet-sized folding card, a website, and a smartphone app.

When assigning a ranking to each fishery, the Seafood Watch program evaluates the fishery in terms of four criteria, which are assessed through a multi-step internal and external review. The first criterion, “impacts on the species under assessment,” assesses metrics of stock abundance and fishing mortality. Fishing mortality (the biomass of fished killed by the fishery) must be at or below the level needed to produce MSY for the target species, and may need to be below MSY levels in multispecies fisheries, species whose life history strategies make them vulnerable (e.g, low reproductive rates), or fisheries characterized by high scientific uncertainty. For depleted species, mortality must be at or below a level needed to rebuild the stock to its target abundance. The second criterion, “impacts on other capture species,” assesses metrics of abundance and mortality for other species caught along with the species under evaluation. The third criterion is “management effectiveness.” A fishery scores well on the third criterion when it is managed to sustain the long-term productivity of all affected species, to prevent negative population impacts on bycatch species, and to maintain high standards of scientific analysis, stakeholder inclusion, and enforcement and compliance. The fourth criterion, “impacts on the habitat and ecosystem,” assesses metrics related to any physical impacts of fishing gear on the habitat/substrate, the existence of practices in place to mitigate gear impacts, and the presence of an ecosystem-based fisheries management system for the species under evaluation.

To encourage use of its rating system and inspire consumers to be thoughtful about their seafood choices, Seafood Watch builds partnerships with restaurants, retailers, seafood suppliers, conservation organizations, governments, and scientific experts. One of its most successful programs was a series held at the Monterey Bay Aquarium between 2002-2012 called “Cooking for Solutions: Celebrity Chefs Celebrate Sustainable Cuisine,” in which chefs led cooking demonstrations and conveyed the message that individuals’ seafood buying decisions can help assure a future with a healthy ocean. A number of major seafood retailers and foodservice companies, including Whole Foods, Bon Appetit Management Co, Compass Group, Aramark, and Red Lobster, have agreed to rely on Seafood Watch’s color-coded rating system for guidance and/or to distribute the program’s wallet cards at their stores.

By the twenty-year anniversary of Seafood Watch in 2019, the program had assessed and listed more than 2,200 fisheries in its color-coded rating system. The Seafood Watch smartphone app had been downloaded 2.3 million times, and 61 million consumer wallet card guides had been distributed. Additionally, 340 business partners at 13,000 locations, ranging from single-location restaurants to major national chains, had committed themselves to integrating the program’s recommendations into their purchases and sales of seafood.

Behavioral change resulting from the Seafood Watch program is harder to measure. According to Roheim (2009), use of the Seafood Watch guide has made a significant impact on seafood sourcing by large corporations, but aside from the number of wallet cards distributed and smartphone app downloads, little is known about how Seafood Watch has affected the purchases of individual consumers. However, Kemmerly and MacFarlane (2008, cited in Roheim 2009) surveyed 400 consumers four months after they had obtained a wallet card during a visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and found that 76% of these consumers reported becoming more diligent when choosing seafood, and/or that they no longer bought seafood rated as “avoid” (red) or “good alternative” (yellow) choices. Whether or not the Seafood Watch program has resulted in desired improvements in the status of marine resources and ecosystems is less clear.

Conclusion

Sustainable seafood marketplace campaigns are part of a larger turn to marketplace activism that has analogues in many different industries. For example, for farmed food and fiber, the U.D. Department of Agriculture’s organic certification “effectively translates ‘organic’ into a market brand and product-differentiation strategy (Goodman & Goodman, 2007).” As with seafood ecolabeling, the “front stage” (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008) of organic marketing is a label that is applied to products and interpreted by consumers as having meaning. In its “back stage” (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008), organic marketing relies on measurable, evidence-based criteria that can be objectively evaluated, thereby framing agriculture “in a natural science discourse” and adopting a position of “epistemological positivism” (Goodman & Goodman, 2007) that closely mirrors the sustainable seafood movement. Other well knownexamples include the Forest Stewardship Council eco-label, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Energy Star” label, Fair Trade International’s “Fair Trade Certified” label, and the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

These marketplace initiatives share a common discourse and similar theories of change. They shine a light on the environmental and social impacts of economic activities and seek to create market pull that privileges products with lower impacts over those with more serious impacts, in the hopes that this will eventually encourage all products to reduce their impacts. These are important contributions, but in our view, the application of this approach to seafood has notable limits. Other authors have questioned the efficacy of sustainable seafood campaigns and critiqued the ways that these campaigns ignore, or even exacerbate, socioeconomic inequities in the seafood system. We neither endorse nor cast doubt on these assertions here, except to say that such criticisms can be remedied within the existing frameworks established by these campaigns.

Rather, we focus on a limit of these campaigns that cannot be remedied within their existing framework: the fact that, in our view, these campaigns are fundamentally incompatible with the application of a systems view of sustainability. According to leading systems thinker Donella Meadows, a system is a “set of elements or parts that is coherently organized and interconnected in a pattern or structure that produces a characteristic set of behaviors, often classified as its ‘function’ or ‘purpose.’” Systems thinking adopts the position that the “parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own (Meadows, 2008).”

Sustainable seafood campaigns, much like the single species fisheries management (SSFM) approach that these campaigns both inspire and emulate, represent reductionist thinking, rather than systems thinking. Reductionism disassembles systems into their constituent parts so that these parts may be analyzed and managed more simply and directly. For fisheries, this has meant breaking down complex ecosystems into individual stocks or populations, and then managing each stock or population based on its internal dynamics, such as its growth, reproduction, fishing removals, and natural mortality. For the most part, both the “object” and the “subject” of this worldview are reductionist: “that which is to be conserved” is the fish stock or population, while “that which is to be constrained” is fishing activity on this population/stock.

To their credit, some sustainable seafood campaigns, such as the MSC, do endeavor to assess impacts of fisheries on other ecological components, such as non-target species and habitats. The MSC articulates these objectives in its Principle 2: “Fishing operations should allow for the maintenance of the structure, productivity, function and diversity of the ecosystem (including habitat and associated dependent and ecologically related species) on which the fishery depends (MSC, 2020).” However, the MSC recognizes the limits of its certification process for addressing ecosystem-level objectives and drivers of change, noting for instance that “[w]hile other fisheries and human uses may affect the marine ecosystem and may ultimately have impacts that prevent MSC certification of all related fisheries, interpretation of the MSC Standard is focused on the fishery seeking certification (MSC, 2020).”

An advantage of reductionism is that it enables rigorous quantitative assessment, which is a point of pride of both SSFM and sustainable seafood campaigns. These campaigns’ devotion to measurable indicators that can be linked directly to the product being evaluated is what endows them with objectivity and credibility. But it can also stifle ecosystem-level thinking, which does not always lend itself to clear-cut metrics or definitive objectives. This is in part why sustainable seafood campaigns have focused on stock-specific outcomes, rather than ecosystem objectives, which tend to be more complex and subjective (Selden et al., 2016).

Although some observers have suggested that a more consistent application of quantitative assessment techniques to Principle 2 evaluation might help the MSC better address ecosystem properties such as biodiversity (Ward 2008a), our view is that doing a better job of reductionism will not lead to systems-level thinking; if anything, it is more likely to act against it. As long as their unit of assessment remains the individual stock or population, and as long as the primary lever in their theory of change is focused on a single source of impact on these populations (fishing), these campaigns will remain limited to a reductionist approach that ignores the forest for the trees.

As a final point, we acknowledge that a tendency towards reductionism is all but inevitable in the global, anonymized marketplace that dominates the buying and selling of seafood today. When the only contact that most consumers have with a marine ecosystem is the seafood product lying before them on the seafood counter or plate, then their only recourse for influencing this ecosystem is to choose whether or not to buy this piece of seafood. In this situation, sustainable seafood campaigns like the MSC and Seafood Watch provide a valuable service. As this scenario illustrates, it is not only these campaigns – but the fundamental structure of globalized market exchange – that acts against ecosystem thinking.

Our quest in the publication Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing is to develop a foundation for the translation of ecosystem-based thinking into marketplace activism. Our review of the sustainable seafood movement leads us to conclude that the reductionist framework underlying these campaigns is incompatible with a systems view in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Additionally, the emphasis of most sustainable seafood campaigns on global standardization and global market penetration leads their adherents away from the kind of place-based thinking that is a prerequisite for ecosystem-level thinking.

Nonetheless, these campaigns serve valuable purposes. They have made important contributions to raising consumer awareness about the connections between consumption and conservation. However, if their single-species underpinnings and their embrace of simplistic dichotomies between “sustainable” and “unsustainable” products are taken too seriously, they can act as a block to the kind of thinking that is necessary to unleash innovation around ecosystem-based marketplace activism. In the next section, we will explore the promise of second movement for fostering such innovation: the local seafood movement.

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