What Is the Role of the Market in Contemporary Fisheries Governance?

With the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the declaration of extended jurisdiction, the nation state became the main focus of fisheries management interventions, and subsequent critiques, in the 1980s and 1990s. But it wasn’t long before practitioners and scholars turned their attention to the role of the market in governing fisheries practices. Using the market is part of a larger business-led approach to sustainability: corporate social responsibility (csr). csr is dynamic and relational, in that it is continually redefined based on the relationship between business and society, and the role and responsibility that society chooses to place on businesses in pursuit of environmental and social justice.1 This means that the market and what is sustainable seafood are always changing. The theory of change here is that by providing a market signal, for example a price premium for a certified product, fish harvesters and seafood processors will be incentivized to voluntarily alter their production practices to comply with that certification. We now have about thirty years of experience trying to operationalize market-based governance through the sustainable seafood movement. What and how have we done? What is likely to be the role of the market in contemporary fisheries management? The sustainable seafood movement began with the launch of Earth Island Institute’s Dolphin Safe certification as a response to high levels of dolphin mortality in the eastern Pacific Ocean tuna purse seine fishery. The Dolphin Safe logo communicated to consumers that their canned tuna was not sourced from a fishery that set nets on dolphins. The impact was huge. Dolphin mortalities dropped by about 98 percent, but in recent years the credibility of the