Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 229

programme is focused on ecological sustainability and involves consumer purchas-
ing power, no matter what the endorsement claims, the inference is always that
the endorsed product is a better choice because it in some way is produced in a
more environmentally responsible manner. It is thus important to ensure that the
inferred objectives of a seafood sustainability programme are addressed by the
standard as well as the explicit objectives encoded into the standard. Therefore, a
standard for ecological sustainability of seafood will generally be expected to reflect
community norms in any relevant ecological matters. For example, the bycatch, or
serious impacts on the behaviour, of endangered species may normally be consid-
ered to be non-sustainable by community standards in the US and in some parts of
Europe. Therefore, any credible standard designed to apply to products in the US
and European countries would express this as a minimum level of performance that
had to be achieved in order to carry the product endorsement.
Establishing what the community norms are in respect to specific issues (such
as bycatch of protected species) is a vexed process. It is, however, important for
market-based incentives to appeal to consumers who will be sensitive to the product
endorsement and respond with their purchasing choices, so it is clear that estab-
lishing the community expectations of what constitutes sustainability is a key part
of setting a seafood sustainability standard. In addition, there are some trade-offs
that may need to be encoded into the standard to ensure consumer-pull is created.
For example, the control of the standard by science and technical matters may need
to be tempered with the reality of consumer trust and motivation: '. . . our analysis
provides underlying evidence that trust may act as a fundamental factor influenc-
ing the acceptability of environmental standards. Stakeholders, who are generally
marginalized by decision-making processes - and especially those interested in
having the behaviour of other actors regulated, as opposed to their own - are more
apt to support initiatives that facilitate their participation and develop non-flexible
rules, regardless of the whether technical experts feel that the resulting standards
are effective' (Auld & Bull 2003).
The issues of sustainability are often technical in nature (such as stock assessment
models, ecological interactions) and there is a considerable requirement in the
best incentive programmes for a technically based assessment for verification of
compliance (Phillips et al. 2003). However, it is clear that the standard should be
informed and supported by technical knowledge, but not prescribed or driven in
scientific or technical terms alone.
The form of the standard, and the way it is constructed and expressed, dictates the
way in which scientific opinion and expertise is used in the assessment/verification
process. If the standard is expressed in a highly technical format, the assessment
processes will be driven by scientists rather than consumers and other stakeholders
(Auld & Bull 2003). This may be the appropriate balance for some incentives or
programmes (such as those applied within an industry) and for some specific fish-
eries and aquaculture ventures, but in many situations, science and technical input
should support the assessment, not control the standard. This does not mean that