The Sustainable Seafood Movement Is a Governance Concert, with the Audience Playing a Key Role

Kate Barclay and Alice Miller
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Kate Barclay: School of International Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia
Alice Miller: BESTTuna Project, Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University (WUR), Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, The Netherlands

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-20

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.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility; ecolabels; ethical consumption; green marketing; supply chain management; sustainable seafood (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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