Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 242

public credibility of the endorsement, the standing of the sponsoring organisations
and the marketing of the 'brand' standing behind the certification. In the future, the
success of such programmes will also depend on much more robust assessments of
success, and particularly on their success and direct achievement of environmental
improvements, which so far have been difficult to demonstrate (Chapter 4).
Ecolabelling and certification programmes that have poorly structured or ex-
pressed standards have weak assessment systems, and those that do not disclose
their sources or assessment procedures bring all seafood sustainability market-based
incentive programmes into disrepute. There is a critical need for all programmes
to adopt much more consistent and transparent systems so that consumers can
develop higher levels of confidence in the various incentive programmes as they
begin to mature. The development of a more formal international approach to
this problem will be able to set the context for a global governance structure for
seafood certification and ecolabelling that properly addresses the issues of perfor-
mance assessment and success measures. This will benefit all parties, and lead to
the improved environmental effectiveness of the market-based incentive model for
seafood.
To be successful, important issues that remain to be addressed by individual
seafood certification and ecolabelling programmes include:
the development of clear, explicit and non-flexible plain language standards and
explanations, so that consumers can know exactly what a product endorsement
really means;
the need for high-quality data and information, and high quality independent
third-party expert judgement upon which verification must be based;
the benefits of a graded series of achievements, so that products and ventures
can be shown to be tangibly improving their performance, and to encourage
lower-performing ventures to nonetheless enter the system for incremental im-
provement;
the imperative for more transparent involvement of stakeholders in standard set-
ting and in verification procedures, to ensure that community norms are applied
and maintained;
the increasing need to educate consumers about the specific details of endorse-
ments, and their meaning and reliability;
the matching of demand-creation incentives (such as launching of new sus-
tainability programmes) to supply-side capacity (the ability to deliver endorsed
products to consumers) so that consumer expectations for product availabil-
ity may be met, reducing the unintended consequences of un-met demand for
certified product;
careful evaluation of the appropriateness of the 'business model' for verification
within voluntary certification systems, considering the difficulties of competition
amongst certifiers and the incentive for ventures to trade certifiers off against
each other for more favourable verification outcomes;