Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 237

place and working well to deliver the objectives and the intended outcomes of
the system. Evaluating success will normally cover the two main sets of activities
of any such programme - the content (the decision system for fisheries products)
and the structure and management of the programme itself. The first relates to the
decision system that is used to determine if a fishery activity is in compliance with
the standard, and therefore deserves the right to carry the product endorsement.
The second aspect is the management, growth and maintenance of the incentive
programme itself, including its control, supporters and stakeholder constituency,
and the financial and staffing basis of the operation. Both are important areas, and
both must be successful for the programme to be effective and maintained.
One important aspect of consumer's perception about the effectiveness of an
ecological sustainability programme is the extent to which it is actually supporting,
promoting and achieving environmental improvements. Narrowly focused assess-
ments, such as that of the MSC environmental gains (Agnew et al . 2006), will do
little to generate consumer support. The MSC analysis, for example, substantially
ignores the extent to which the standard itself is set at a level that is appropriate,
which is potentially a much more important measure to convince consumers that
the ecolabelling programme is achieving environmental improvements.
10.6.2 The decision basis for determining success
As a result of the difficulties of defining the meaning of ecological sustainability
and the diversity of the world's fishing and aquaculture ventures, most ecological
sustainability assessment systems use criteria and procedures for assessing the
sustainability of marine fisheries that are determined uniquely for each fishery or
aquaculture venture being assessed. These are sometimes set within broader guiding
sustainability principles (May et al . 2003; and see Chapters 4, 16).
Despite the basic uncertainties discussed above, the issues of concern (the five
core elements of sustainability identified in Section 10.2) have been established,
and it is clear that to be successful, a broad assessment of sustainability must at least
reflect these issues, and an ecological assessment must assess the environmental
aspects of these issues. A high-quality sustainability assessment programme would
comprehensively include them within a standard that comprised a set of criteria
and related performance indicators for making unambiguous judgements about the
compliance of a venture submitted for assessment.
For the set of issues within ecological sustainability, based on the crite-
ria established for ecolabels (US Consumers Union: www.eco-labels.org/good
ecolabel.cfm) and for the ecological sustainability of seafood more specifically
(after Elliott 2000, Gardiner & Viswanathan 2004), the set of performance indica-
tors shown in Table 10.1 will apply to a range of the important aspects of many
seafood ecological sustainability certification and ecolabelling programmes.