Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 235

lining, water pollution and bycatch. Awarding of certification or an ecolabel would
be contingent on the venture being assessed as achieving at least the admission
level of performance for every decision element in the standard (see Chapter 16 for
a description of such a system).
Pass/fail systems inevitably focus attention on the achievement of performance at
the defined pass/fail boundary. This can be counter-productive because the absolute
nature of the verification (the yes/no decision) can be inconsistent with the problem
of achieving sustainability, which is more correctly considered to be a continuum of
activities and outcomes. While there may be some circumstances where a venture
being assessed under a grading system as described above might also be faced
with a single pass/fail decision that decided if the certification was to be awarded,
this would occur less frequently than in either numerical scoring systems or in
simple pass/fail systems. Like the MSC programme, which uses a numerical scoring
system, a grading system with multiple levels of performance would be open to
conditional award of the ecolabel, subject to ongoing requirements for upgrading
of performance to a higher class.

10.6 Determining success

10.6.1 What to measure?
Much of the success of a market-based incentive lies in the market and consumer
perceptions of credibility and robustness of the incentive programme. Without a
point of competitive market and product differentiation for a programme, created by
the credibility of the incentive endorsement, attempts to introduce such incentives
to improve practices will not lead to actual sustainability improvements. This link-
age between environmental improvements and endorsed seafood products driven
by consumer choice is the primary basis for determining if a seafood ecolabelling
programme is successful. The obvious first parameter to success is the extent of
market acceptance and market penetration of the certified products. However, this
alone does not provide the measure of a successful market-based incentive pro-
gramme because it says nothing about ecological improvements (Muller 2002).
Only if the certification/ecolabel programme is supported with a robust standard
and a strong verification system can the extent of market penetration be considered
to be a useful indicator of ecological achievements.
The analysis of ecological achievements of the MSC programme (Agnew et al .
2006) focused on the changes that were considered to have been created through
the condition-setting process used in the MSC verification methodology (Chaffee
et al. 2003; Chapter 4, and see Chapter 14 for further discussion of this MSC eval-
uation). The evaluation found four types of gains that could be potentially ascribed
to the effects of the MSC programme - institutional, research, operational action
and operational result - within the conditions set by certifiers on the sample of
ten fisheries evaluated. This is a narrow view of success, since, as recognised by