Advancing the Global Marketplace for Sustainable Seafood: The Seafood Choices Alliance - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 155

First, the Alliance is market-driven : Seafood Choices engages industry to provide
solutions to the crisis of overfishing and the long-term health of the ocean. Often
these solutions are in advance of, or in addition to, government policy requirements.
Second, it is science-based : the work is grounded in high-quality scientific research,
ensuring that its members have the most accurate, credible information to advance
solutions on issues related to sustainable seafood. Third, it is integrated : Seafood
Choices brings together the often-opposing camps of the seafood industry and
conservationists to engage in honest dialogue, identify common ground and explore
potential areas for collaboration. And perhaps most importantly, it is participatory :
our partnership-based association is open to individuals and businesses interested
in actively engaging in and working towards responsible business practices that
improve seafood sustainability. These characteristics allow the Alliance to leverage
the power of markets, science and policy to promote sustainable seafood and a
healthy ocean.
The Seafood Choices Alliance exists to help protect the marine environment, and
its underlying philosophy is to create a climate in which it can emphasise the value
(economically, environmentally and socially) of sustainable seafood. In turn, that
climate allows all of the individual activities, projects and investments - by both
the conservation community and the global seafood industry - to be branded as
part of a growing, more powerful trend that is bigger than any one organisation or
programme. The theory of change underlying the Alliance's approach is that this
'conditioning the climate' must be done strategically and consistently to ensure
that the climate is always ripe for dialogue and market transformation to occur.
In the end, the Alliance is aiming for 'common issue recognition' - a collective
recognition that paves the way for concrete, incremental commitments from major
buyers to begin to shift the marketplace.
This 'big tent' approach is not about everyone being in lock-step together or
always agreeing philosophically (i.e. in the sense of a coalition). Instead, this ap-
proach explicitly works to encourage dialogue among disparate perspectives so
that the result is greater awareness, recognition or salience and a climate in which
a marketplace for sustainable seafood can emerge. Industry members are asked to
engage in a dialogue that reflects their concern about threats to the ocean and then
to take action, such as buying seafood from sustainable sources. At the same time,
each company is applying those principles in ways unique to their own corporate
structure and operational capacity. The Alliance works to provide seafood busi-
nesses with a path towards incremental change and seeks to open the door widely
to all of those willing to take part in the debate.
7.3.2 The work of the alliance
The previous section outlined the overall philosophy and general approach of
the Seafood Choices Alliance. It is now instructive to examine a few key ex-
amples illustrating how the organisation turns that theory into practice, and how