Fourth Movement: Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing

Sarah Schumann1

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

Although we have titled this piece on “ecosystem-based fisheries marketing” a fourth “movement,” the vision that we propose here does not describe a new direction in either the sense of a social movement nor a scientific paradigm shift, as in the previous three “movements” we have reviewed in this series. Rather, what we propose here is a process of overlaying elements of the previous three “movements” in order to reveal new possibilities for achieving good that can only be brought about through such a convergence.

From the sustainable seafood movement, we borrow a commitment to fisheries as renewable resources needing care and conservation, and adopt the premise of turning the marketplace into an arena for beneficial action through which consumers can express this care. But we abandon the sustainable seafood movement’s reliance on framings and metrics associated with single-species fisheries management (SSFM), turning instead to the emergent framework of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) for guidance.

From EBFM, we adopt a focus on system-level ecological thinking that illuminates how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We draw from a rich, detailed, and ever-expanding body of scientific work that aims to decipher the relationships between fisheries, interacting species, environmental factors, and dynamically changing climates, and to manage these systems holistically for the provision of seafood from the ocean. Since ecosystems are places, each with their own particular species composition, biogeographical characteristics, climate, and socio-ecological character, this cross-pollination requires an approach to marketing that is spatially explicit. We find this in the local seafood movement.

From the local seafood movement, we adopt the notion of “place” as an organizing principle, and identify the movement’s motivated networks of fishermen, farmers markets, community-supported fishery (CSF) programs, boat-to-table restaurants, food policy councils, and locavore consumers as providing an ideal scaffolding around which the mantle of EBFM can be wrapped.

We call the coalescence that we propose “ecosystem-based fisheries marketing.” To understand how it fits into the frameworks that we have already described in this series, we employ a verbal analogy: ecosystem-based fisheries marketing is to EBFM as the sustainable seafood movement is to SSFM. To develop this statement further, we briefly return to the discussion of the sustainable seafood movement that we detailed in our “first movement.”

Sustainable seafood movement paragons like the Marine Stewardship Council ecolabel and the Seafood Watch ratings scheme rely on rigorous “back stage” processes for categorizing seafood products. This technical work tends to be concealed behind the appealing, consumer-ready “front stage” of such campaigns (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008). The “back stage” of these campaigns is typically some form of marketplace transliteration of the tenets of SSFM: stock-based indicators are evaluated against stock-based reference points, and based on the outcomes of these comparisons, declarations are made (via labeling and listings) to either support or disincentivize fishing on certain stocks. Like SSFM, these labeling and listing determinations focus on fish stocks as the units of analysis and action, and like SSFM, they focus on fishing itself as the predominant, if not exclusive, impact of concern on these units.

By channeling single-species metrics and objectives into product labeling and consumer recommendations, the sustainable seafood movement reifies SSFM’s conceptual partitioning of ecosystems into collections of fragmented resources. Through this reification, the movement has embedded an “important discursive element” (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008) in how the public thinks about the sustainability of seafood.

The conceptual fragmentation of ecosystems that is embodied in SSFM and reified through the sustainable seafood movement is replicated physically in the global seafood marketplace by the ecological dislocation, geographic dispersal, and subsequent commingling of seafood products from disparate ecosystems. In this process, three-dimensional ecosystems are collapsed into two-dimensional ordering lists and seafood displays in which fish are reduced to units to be labeled, considered, selected, and purchased, without regard to their ecological role or origin.

“Ethical consumers” presented with this array are instructed to make “smart choices” from among an assortment of such units, which are characterized by their price, product form, appearance, country of origin, flavor, and – thanks to the sustainable seafood movement – their certification status or approval rating. But conspicuously from an ecological standpoint, these units have lost all relation to their ecological role: e.g., what species they preyed upon, what species they were preyed upon by, what habitats they lived in, how their spawning and migration patterns were linked to the climatic and oceanic patterns of their area, and how their role in these interconnected networks helped maintain the structure of the whole.

The sustainable seafood thrives in such globalized spaces, in which food “comes from a global everywhere, yet from nowhere… in particular (Kloppenburg et al., 1996).” It may be argued that global competition helps create pressure on seafood supply chain actors to seek certification for their respective fisheries, and that the ability of consumers and marketers to substitute a “discouraged” seafood product with a comparable “approved” product from another region is what enables these campaigns to create market pull. Moreover, because sustainable seafood campaigns require one-size-fits-all metrics that can be objectively applied -- whether assessing, for example, the French Polynesia albacore longline fishery, the Western Bering Sea pollock fishery, or any other fishery worldwide – standardization across regions is highly valued.

But ecosystems are places, and marketplace analogues to EBFM must also be place-based. One-size-fits-all thinking is not necessary, nor even appropriate, in this context, as it acts against an understanding of ecosystems as special places, each with their own unique structure, function, and locally determined prioritization of ecosystem services. In a marketplace analogue to EBFM, market analysis and planning will need to done on the basis of ecoregions, defined by Spalding et al. (2007) as:

Areas of relatively homogeneous species composition, clearly distinct from adjacent systems… The dominant biogeographic forcing agents defining the eco-regions vary from location to location but may include isolation, upwelling, nutrient inputs, freshwater influx, temperature regimes, ice regimes, exposure, sediments, currents, and bathymetric or coastal complexity. In ecological terms, these are strongly cohesive units, sufficiently large to encompass ecological or life history processes for most sedentary species.

Serendipitously, the local seafood movement has already begun to spatialize the seafood marketplace, and to do so in a way that gives conceptual primacy to notions of interconnectedness. For instance, the movement’s promotion of “relational seafood supply chains” (Stoll et al., 2019), which “can be understood as production systems that better connect fishers and consumers via geographic proximity and other means,” echoes on the socio-economic side what EBFM highlights on the ecological side: the notion that the relationships among things are just as important as the things themselves.

As discussed in our “second movement,” local seafood initiatives to-date have tended to accentuate social and economic values, such as providing “a support system for producers to improve their economic condition and to maintain locally-based fishing communities and cultures (Olson et al., 2014).” Their development of environmental values has been less robust. Although many local seafood initiatives purport to be environmentally beneficial in some abstract way, the local seafood movement lacks the kind of explicit and deliberate consideration of environmental concerns that drives the sustainable seafood movement. For this reason, our “second movement” piece suggested that the environmental claims of the local seafood movement succumb to the “local trap,” defined as “the tendency of food activists and researchers to assume” that the local scale automatically delivers desirable benefits such as “ecological sustainability, social justice, democracy, better nutrition, and food security, freshness, and quality (Born & Purcell, 2006).”

We also concluded in the “second movement” that the local seafood movement’s lack of concerted attention to environmental goals to-date in no way signifies a lack of potential to innovate and do good in this area. Quite the contrary: we believe the local seafood movement brims with potential to advance ecological sustainability -- specifically, as we propose, through the integration of principles of EBFM into marketplace activism.

In our view, the fact that the local seafood movement has not already brought forth the imaginative ecology-marketing mashup that we propose is most likely due to epistemic siloization. The leaders of the local seafood movement tend to be small-scale fishermen, community-based nonprofits, and scholars from the social sciences. Ecologists and fisheries scientists tend to be underrepresented relative to these other communities.

Additionally, in our own experience, we have detected an undervaluing of fisheries science and ecology among leaders of the local seafood movement, some of whom have told us that ecology “makes their eyes to glaze over” and that “the public is interested in food, not science.” We suspect that such attitudes may in part result from a mental association between fisheries science and the tough decisions made in the SSFM fisheries management context, in which determinations about stock status can result in hardship for fishermen and their communities.

We find these comments unfortunate, but we are not deterred. In truth, EBFM is highly complex (as are ecosystems themselves) and we would not expect small-scale fishermen, social scientists, and community-based nonprofit leaders to grasp its intricacies. In fact, the author of these four pieces (a small-scale fisherman and social scientist herself) ventured well beyond her familiarity zone in writing the “third movement” of this series, and is all too aware that her training has not provided her with the skills to navigate these topics adeptly!

That is why bringing about a cross-pollination between EBFM and the local seafood movement requires not only the importation of a set of basic principles from EBFM into seafood marketing work, but a full bridging of the epistemic communities that have sprung up around local seafood and EBFM, respectively. This bridging can start here and now, in the online platform Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing, which aspires to create a virtual space where these communities can begin to work together and give shape to shared goals.

A proposed definition

We wish to avoid being overly prescriptive about what “ecosystem-based fisheries marketing” might look like in practice. After all, if successful, the Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing platform that this issue inaugurates will provide a broad-based, adaptable space for co-creation of this vision among a wide range of practitioners and scholars in the days and years ahead, and there is no need to constrain future creativity by getting ahead of ourselves in this first issue. Nonetheless, for the sake of clarity, we lay out a few observations with regard to what “ecosystem-based fisheries marketing” might be, and how it might be beneficial.

As a point of departure, we loosely define “ecosystem-based fisheries marketing” as:

the coordinated deployment of supply chain innovations, marketing tactics, food system planning activities, consumer education efforts, and related strategies to help attain ecosystem-level goals for a spatially defined fishery ecosystem, as determined through public input and informed by the science and principles of EBFM, including but not limited to the maintenance of ecosystem structure and function and the promotion of emergent properties such as socio-ecological resilience.

In the next few paragraphs, we will break down the elements of this definition, starting with the phrase “coordinated deployment.” As noted in the “second movement” in this series, the local seafood movement is a decentralized assortment of bottom-up initiatives that may or may not view themselves as part of a common endeavor. This decentralized style is in keeping with movement’s democratic, small-scale ethos. However, any effort aiming to operate at the ecosystem level requires some degree of higher-order coordination. In the context of ecosystem-based fisheries marketing, this could be some kind of formal or informal planning process, taking place at the scale of a marine ecoregion, through which practitioners can agree upon locally appropriate system-level goals. These goals would then be advanced through the types of decentralized efforts that are already underway.

In other words, the marketing work itself need not be centralized, but the setting of ecosystem-level goals must be centrally coordinated if it is to align with the scale and scope of ecosystem thinking. After all, one of the primary benefits associated with shifting from a piecemeal approach like SSFM to a system-based approach like EBFM is a reduction in the potential for management actions to work at cross-purposes to one another (Fogarty, 2014); the same logic applies in the marketing context.

Next, we consider the phrase, “supply chain innovations, marketing tactics, food system planning activities, consumer education efforts, and related strategies.” As detailed in our “second movement,” the local seafood movement is a variegated potpourri of initiatives that includes novel supply chain structures such as CSF programs, dockside seafood sales, and farmers market seafood vendors, as well as the shortening of supply chains bringing locally landed seafood into nearby restaurants and institutions. It has included the introduction of values-based aggregator businesses aiming to keep seafood local. It has included the integration of seafood into state-, local-, and regional-level food policy councils and a renewed interest in local branding among seafood marketing councils. It has included an explosion of interest on the part of consumers in learning about where their seafood comes from, and a surge in nonprofit and university extension work aiming to provide this information. In theory, all of these existing initiatives can be mobilized to help attain ecosystem-level goals.

Next, we consider the phrase, “ecosystem-level goals.” As discussed in the “third movement” of this series, ecosystem-level management does not lend itself to “the adoption of clearly defined standards for assessment and management (Fogarty, 2014)” in the same way that SSFM does. Therefore, instead of a one-size-fits-all benchmark akin to maximum sustainable yield (MSY), EBFM scholars recommend the use of a dashboard of ecosystem-level indicators to track ecosystem status. Many indicators have been proposed, including those that focus on species composition, trophic structure, size structure, biomass of the system and its components, as well as indicators relevant to fishery landings and resource potential.

Development of a marketplace analogue to EBFM will require the development of market-related indicators at the ecosystem level as well, and these must be keyed to ecosystem goals that are devised with extensive public input. Once established, we envision that such indicators can guide disparate marketing initiatives towards common aspirations, providing a sort of ecoregion-level “strategic plan” that helps drive public and private funding, investment, and decision-making towards the goals that have been established for a fishery ecosystem.

Next, we consider the phrase, “spatially defined fishery ecosystem.” As noted above, ecosystem-based fisheries marketing will need to center its strategies around specific places in the ocean. To date, most local seafood marketing efforts seem to fix their spatial focus on places relevant to landings and political boundaries (e.g., a port or state), rather than on ecologically defined regions of the ocean that are responsible for fisheries production. In keeping with the principles of EBFM, ecosystem-based seafood marketing should adopt a place-based perspective focused on coastal and marine ecoregions. Marine ecoregion boundaries are fluid, and ecosystems are often “nested” within larger systems (Spalding et al., 2007). Thus, it may be appropriate for marketing efforts to focus on overlapping production areas, or for one marketing effort to be nested within another larger one, as long as their ecological goals are compatible.

In our view, ecosystem-based fisheries marketing does not necessarily dictate that seafood be sold and bought within a certain foodshed or radius of landings. Although many local seafood marketing efforts adopt a food miles framework, we can envision scenarios in which exclusive reliance on nearby supply chains may be incompatible with ecosystem-level marketing goals. For example, if a goal is set to increase the harvest of a species that has become highly abundant in a particular marine ecoregion, but this species does not experience adequate market demand in the abutting terrestrial region, then it might be advisable to work on enhancing long-distance supply chains or export markets for this species. As an alternative or additional measure, marketers may also opt to invest in building demand for such a species in the abutting terrestrial region. Both approaches would be compatible with an ecosystem-based fisheries marketing framework, even though only the latter meets a food miles-based interpretation of “local”.

Next, we consider the phrase, “as determined through public input and informed by the science and principles of EBFM.” As we described in the “third movement” of this series, the selection of system-level goals should be informed by science, but goal-setting is ultimately a public policy decision. Because EBFM – and likewise, ecosystem-based fisheries marketing – is designed to confront tradeoffs among diverse societal goals, it must be informed by extensive stakeholder input and the balancing of different societal priorities. EBFM has embraced management strategy evaluation (MSE) as a decision support tool to help navigate this complex task. As described in the “third movement” of this series, MSE uses scenario testing within an ecosystem-based operating model to “try out” various courses of action and visualize the predicted impacts of each action on the ecosystem as a whole as well as its constituent parts.

Ecosystem-based fisheries marketing efforts should adhere to the same best practices as EBFM, even if marketing actions are not official public policy decisions. Use of MSE to simulate the outcomes of different marketing strategies can be a useful aide, and the marketplace modeling capabilities of MSE operating models should be enhanced for this purpose. For maximum effect and efficiency, planning and goal-setting for ecosystem-based fisheries marketing should be carried out in parallel with planning and goal-setting for EBFM in the management sphere. As RFMCs continue to carry out EBFM planning efforts, complementary planning efforts could be set in motion on the marketplace side as well, perhaps by food policy councils or regional umbrella groups.

Next, we consider the phrase, “maintenance of ecosystem structure and function.” Setting a goal of maintaining ecosystem structure (components such as species, populations, communities, and habitats) and ecosystem function (processes such as production, consumption, respiration, energy flow, and cycling) is a generic way of capturing the idea that ecosystem-based fisheries marketing should contribute to perpetuation of whole ecosystems, as opposed to their individual parts. In fact, it is sometimes possible for ecosystem structure and function to remain intact even as individual ecosystem components decrease in abundance. “Functional redundancy” (i.e., in which several species play similar ecological roles, such as preying on the same species in the same area) can enable some species to “fill in” for others when the latter experience population declines. Such properties are becoming ever-more important in light of the world’s changing climate. While SSFM and the sustainable seafood movement emphasize the maintenance of specific species or stocks at or above a certain biomass level, a focus on ecosystem structure and function instead emphasizes maintenance of the roles and relations in a system; ecosystem-based fisheries marketing would adopt a similar approach.

Finally, we consider the phrase “promotion of emergent properties such as socio-ecological resilience.” According to Berkes (2011),

Social-ecological systems may be defined as integrated complex systems that include social (human) and ecological (biophysical) subsystems in a two-way feedback relationship. The term emphasizes that the two parts (social system and ecological system) are equally important, and they function as a coupled, interdependent, and co-evolutionary system.

Resilience, as discussed in the “third movement” of our series, is “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks (Walker et al., 2004).⁠” Promotion of socio-ecological resilience is a vital focus in today’s changing world, “as the biosphere and its components are increasingly exposed to a world exceeding the millennial historical range of variation. Resilience in this context implies that some degree of ecosystem change may reflect processes of adaptation to altered environmental conditions; change is not necessarily an indicator of ecosystem failure (Falk et al., 2019).”

Applying the notion of socio-ecological resilience to the present context implies that ecosystem-based fisheries marketing should focus not only on the biophysical subsystem that is responsible for fishery production in the marine environment, but equally on the resilience of associated human subsystems, such as the harvest system, marketing system, food system, and governance system – all of which are ultimately intertwined with each other and the biophysical system in complex ways that will need to adapt and flex as all subsystems – human and biophysical – continue to grapple with the impacts of global change.

Local seafood practitioners and advocates are already taking note of this challenge and of the need for new words and concepts to contend with it. In 2019, Nic Mink, co-founder of the direct-to-consumer business Sitka Salmon Shares, declared the notion of “sustainable” seafood “dead,” a casualty of climate change:

As ocean conditions change radically before our eyes, sustainable seafood’s baseline scientific assumptions are unraveling at a speed… In this world, managing fisheries for long-term sustainable yield or for some minimum biomass threshold is increasingly impossible… For seafood-loving consumers… continuing to mobilize around the idea of sustainable seafood wrongly assumes that eaters, even those with the best intentions, should expect that the choices they make today will somehow perpetuate the species they currently love to eat… To birth a new seafood system will require a paradigm shift for all actors in the seafood supply chain. And while the answers to many of the most pressing questions aren’t yet apparent, until then, those of us involved in the seafood system—from fishers and eaters to bureaucrats and scientists—must regroup, rethink, and reframe our priorities and values in the era of climate change. The movement must find new ideas to support a vision for the future of seafood. Sustainability should not be one of them.

Conclusion

In this piece, we have advocated for the forging of a new epistemic community and the elaboration of new knowledge, goals, and strategies to foster the development of a marketplace analogue to EBFM. More particularly, we suggest that this analogue can be expeditiously introduced as a new layer to the already-flourishing local seafood movement. We believe that such a convergence, which we label “ecosystem-based fisheries marketing,” stands to advance both the local seafood movement and the mainstreaming of EBFM in new ways.

First, the incorporation of ecosystem-based thinking stands to strengthen the local seafood movement’s environmental value proposition. To date, most of the environmental rhetoric around local seafood has been based on assumption rather than ambition, as seen in the casual elision between the terms “local” and “sustainable” that we described in the “second movement” of this series. Some local seafood initiatives can rightfully claim best-in-class status when it comes to the low carbon footprint associated with product transportation (McClenachan et al., 2014), but by and large, the local seafood movement seems to have ceded the high ground to the SSFM-inspired sustainable seafood movement when it comes to explicit, science-backed commitments to marine conservation. By playing to the local seafood movement’s strengths – its place-based nature and its emphasis on relational networks --“ecosystem-based fisheries marketing” not only has potential to enhance the local seafood movement’s “green” credentials, but to make the movement indispensable to unlocking marketplace conservation at the ecosystem level.

Second, we posit that the application of ecosystem-based thinking to the marketplace can help accelerate the much-needed transition to EBFM in government policy making as well. In the “first movement” in this series, we reviewed how conservation groups pursued a successful two-track strategy in the 1990s by pairing marketplace activism with political activism aimed at strengthening conservation provisions in the Magnuson Stevens Act, leading ultimately to the act’s reauthorization as the “Sustainable Fisheries Act” in 1996. By all appearances, marketplace campaigns provided indirect assistance to policy action by embedding an “important discursive element” (Bostrom & Klintman, 2008) in the public imagination – namely, that fisheries were in crisis and the solution was to impose stronger SSFM conservation measures.

At present, the science of fisheries management is navigating a “Kuhnian crisis” (Tudela & Short, 2005) in which SSFM has amply shown the chinks in its armor, but EBFM has not fully replaced it as the primary framework for managing fisheries. Thus, it seems like an appropriate time to give EBFM a little nudge through marketplace activism. Perhaps, by accustoming consumers and supply chain actors to ecological thinking in the marketplace, ecosystem-based fisheries marketing can ultimately help pave the way for fuller instatement of EBFM as the primary organizing framework for managing fisheries.

Finally, even if EBFM is fully mainstreamed, managers will still be limited to the finite set of tools in the fisheries management toolbox when trying to accomplish ecosystem-level goals. Generally speaking, fisheries managers are empowered to limit where, when, and how fishermen fish, and to limit the amount that fishermen are allowed to catch. However, they cannot set lower bounds on catch, nor can they fully address the impacts of non-fishing activities to fishery ecosystems. Marketplace strategies may be able to help fill these gaps.

For example, in their desire to attain or maintain a certain food web structure, fisheries managers operating under EBFM may from time to time find it useful to increase the harvest of particular species. This could occur, for instance, if an unharvested or lightly harvested population was at risk of “taking over” the ecological niche of a heavily harvested (and therefore economically desirable) species, or if managers sought to increase the abundance of a prey species by cropping down the population of its predators. Some scholars have advocated that EBFM embrace a “balanced harvest” strategy in which all edible species in an ecosystem are harvested in equal proportion to their ecological production (Garcia et al., 2011, 2012; Zhou et al., 2010). However, one of the biggest impediments to making this work in practice is that different species have different dollar values in the marketplace (Burgess et al., 2015.)

In all of these scenarios, fisheries management is limited in what it can do. It has the tools to constrain fishery harvests, but not to encourage greater harvests. But where fisheries management has only sticks, marketing can supply carrots. By cultivating new markets and boosting ex-vessel prices through demand-building and public education strategies, marketing has a critical role to play in the implementation of EBFM. In fact, it can be argued that EBFM cannot meet its goals without companion efforts in the marketplace. Local seafood marketing initiatives such as CSFs have already demonstrated their ability to enhance consumer appetites for “underutilized” species (McClenachan et al., 2014; Witter & Stoll, 2017). Further leveraging of these capacities to incentivize fishing patterns that align with ecosystem-level goals established under EBFM is perhaps one of the clearest examples of how ecosystem-based fisheries marketing and EBFM can reinforce each other.

When it comes to another conspicuous missing piece of fisheries management – its inability to directly address negative impacts on fish populations from non-fishing activities – we must admit that marketing, too, is limited in what it can do. Marketing cannot impose fines on polluters or remove dams from spawning rivers. However, marketing can be a pathway to pubic engagement, and an actively engaged public who cares about their seafood may be prompted to advocate on behalf of fisheries to agencies and entities that are empowered to address these impacts.

Local seafood marketing initiatives such as CSFs have already shown their capacity to enhance public recognition of the value of fisheries and to create opportunities for fishermen and seafood eaters to advocate on behalf of local fisheries issues (Brinson et al., 2018; Olson et al., 2014; Witter & Stoll, 2017). For instance, we have personally observed a tight coupling between direct-to-consumer marketing of Bristol Bay salmon and consumer engagement in advocacy around protecting Bristol Bay’s watershed from hard rock mining (succinctly captured in the “Eat wild save wild” slogan2). Building on this trendsetting example, we believe there is a great deal of potential for local seafood marketing initiatives to create positive feedback loops involving local seafood, consumers, and advocacy to address non-fishing impacts to fishery habitats and ecosystems.

This concludes the inaugural issue of Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing, “The Case for Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing: A Symphony in Four Movements.” We hope this first issue has been sufficiently compelling to attract a diverse array of practitioners and scholars to embark on further elaboration of this vision in the days and years ahead. It is possible that the union of EBFM and the local seafood movement that we call for is already underway, but that it lacks a distinct identity and name. If this is the case, then we hope that the Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing platform serves to put a name to it so that it can advance more resolutely.

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