Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 222

give an unreasonable weight to management processes at the expense of ecological
or socio-economic outcomes (see below for balance of assessment elements). In
the forestry sector, the standards of different certification programmes have con-
verged from different starting points to the situation where now they generally
incorporate aspects of both processes (systems-based approach) and of outcomes
(performance-based approach) into their standards (Auld & Bull 2003).
For the purpose of assessing ecological sustainability, design and implementation
of a standard consisting exclusively of ecological outcomes is, however, largely
a matter for conjecture. Few fisheries or aquaculture ventures could ever show
compliance with such standards in more than a limited set of ecological issues,
and it is questionable if such a standard could be developed with the longevity to
withstand the commercial pressures of the marketplace, and it may not be able to
permit the incentive loop to be completed (Chapter 1). Although there may be some
fisheries or aquaculture ventures that have sufficient information and data to be able
to verify that they comply with a solely ecological outcomes-based standard, they
may have difficulty with supplying enough product to the market to create and
maintain the incentive loop particularly in the highly competitive and globalised
seafood market of today (see Chapters 9 and 18). This, coupled with the high levels
of uncertainty and inertia in the seafood sector, means that a standard developed
to be ecologically pure would have little practical support outside some sectional
interests, and would not prove to be a very viable market-based incentive.
It is therefore important to achieve a practical balance in the standard between
outcomes and processes. This creates the situation where consumers, stakeholders
and the industry can become fully engaged and support an incentive programme
that is feasible and achievable. Achieving this balance is a delicate process, but
crucial to the success of a certification or ecolabelling programme. By focusing
on both outcomes and processes, such a standard also serves to draw the attention
of consumers to the breadth of management processes that are important to the
continuous improvement concept of sustainability.

10.4.5 A balanced standard

The standard should clearly set out what balance is intended between the various
elements of the sustainability assessment. Clearly expressing the balance amongst
the elements of the standard, and weighting of the issues, is crucial to ensure that
consumers accept that their issues of concern are being appropriately addressed
through the application of the standard. A most crucial balance to express and to
establish in the standard (as discussed above) is the relative importance placed on
the outcomes of the management system in the fishery compared to the management
processes adopted to achieve those outcomes.
Some consumers may consider that a seafood sustainability standard should be
primarily about demonstrated outcomes, such as ensuring that seacages do not
provide a source of disease or genetically modified species that are released to the