Inclusive governance of aquaculture value-chains: Co-producing sustainability standards for Bangladeshi shrimp and prawns

Highlights

• Aquaculture standards criticised as closed settings narrowly framing sustainability.

• SEAT project gave effect to participatory workshops for co-producing standards.

• A workshop convened with Bangladeshi shrimp and prawn stakeholders in Khulna.

• Workshops successfully broadened participation and framing of sustainability.

• Workshops appeared to increase trust and legitimacy of the standard-setting process.

Abstract

The rapid global growth in aquaculture, described as a ‘blue revolution’, has demanded new modes of market governance along long international value-chains. In large part this governance has been built on an expanding framework of voluntary industry-led standards, though latterly these standards have drawn some criticism. Such criticism has largely centred on (i) a crisis of trust, related to (ii) the closed development of these standards by a powerful few, and (iii) a relatively narrow framing of sustainability according to techno-scientific, best-practice criteria. This article introduces the SEAT research project, which sought to address these criticisms by co-producing indices of sustainable aquaculture indicators according to ‘top-down’ inputs from scientific, government and industry experts, and ‘bottom-up’ inputs from aquaculture stakeholders along the value-chains. It particularly focuses on how the project elicited these ‘bottom-up’ indicators through inclusive workshops with aquaculture stakeholders, drawing on concepts and approaches from practical ethics. It describes and evaluates the approach in one particular workshop with Bangladeshi shrimp and prawn stakeholders, and in so doing seeks to make methodological contributions to on-going debates on how to affect participatory aquaculture governance. The experience highlighted the potential difficulty in assembling a truly diverse group of stakeholders, but did demonstrate the potential of value-ranking and scenario exercises for mobilising a rich store of knowledge for the bottom-up construction of standards, as an important compliment to expert-led top-down initiatives. Workshop participants themselves emphasised the workshops as a unique opportunity for learning about the different framings of sustainability along the value-chain, and urged facilitators to emulate the workshops more widely, from the farm-scale to the global scale.

Introduction

The past 40 years has seen the rapid growth of aquaculture, with this growth largely spurred by important techno-scientific advances and parallel innovations in governance. Dubbed a ‘blue revolution’, today almost half of the world's seafood is farmed, with the industry employing an estimated 24 million people worldwide, mostly in developing countries (Bush et al., 2013). The accelerated global development of aquaculture technologies and markets has arguably outpaced traditional approaches to state-led, centralised and hierarchal environmental management. Scholars like Stead (2005) and Chuenpagdee et al. (2008) describe the emergent self-regulation of the aquaculture industry according to a decentralised concept of market governance, along ‘value-chains’ that stretch half way around the globe. This sees governance as networks of actors interacting across multiple private and public institutions, and steered largely by voluntary industry standards, certification schemes, codes of conduct, guidelines and principles (here collectively labelled as ‘standards’). Such standards have been important governance mechanisms for shaping the sustainable development of aquaculture; mitigating its social and environmental impacts, and creating markets for aquaculture products by building trust through traceability and transparency (Hatanaka et al., 2005).

However, while ostensibly a model case of governance-under-globalisation, the framework of aquaculture standards has drawn critique from some commentators (see e.g. Bush et al., 2013, Kalfagianni and Pattberg, 2013). Much of this critique has centred on (i) the paradox of too many standards and an associated crisis of trust: (ii) the exclusive development of these standards by a powerful few; and attendantly (iii) the narrow framing of sustainability in these standards. Arguably the aquaculture industry has been driven by a narrow ‘techno-scientific’ discourse of sustainability, where sustainable aquaculture is defined as economic growth within ecological limits, and where those limits are defined scientifically and traversed technologically (Lebel et al., 2008, Millar and Tomkins, 2007). Such framings have arguably neglected an appreciation for the multi-faceted and political nature of sustainability, with weaker actors excluded from voicing their vision of sustainability in developing standards (Kalfagianni and Pattberg, 2013). This is the point of departure for this article, which takes up calls for more inclusive aquaculture governance.

This article discusses methodological lessons from the SEAT (‘Sustaining Ethical Aquaculture Trade’) research project, which studied value-chains bringing farmed seafood from Asia to Europe, and attempted to ‘co-produce’ indices of indicators for measuring the sustainability of this trade, to be used by different governance actors. This is co-production in the sense of partnership or joint governance (see also co-creation),¹ and meant producing indices by integrating ‘top-down’ inputs from scientific, government and industry experts with ‘bottom-up’ inputs from aquaculture stakeholders along the value-chains. Here the focus is on how the project elicited these bottom-up inputs using workshops designed according to concepts and methods from practical ethics; bringing together stakeholders from along the value-chain to negotiate what is to be sustained for whom, and accordingly their own indicators of sustainability. The article describes how the workshop approach was implemented in Bangladesh with shrimp and prawn stakeholders, and evaluates this experience in terms of lessons learned on its usefulness in the particular Bangladeshi context according to some stated criteria. In this way, the article hopes to make both conceptual and methodological contributions to broader aquaculture governance debates on how to open standard-setting institutions.

The article begins in Section 2 with a discussion of the challenges facing aquaculture governance, before Section 3 describes how the SEAT project took up these challenges by attempting to co-produce indices of sustainable aquaculture, drawing on perspectives from practical ethics. Section 4 then describes how we operationalised these perspectives within a participatory workshop approach. It begins with a short introduction to the Bangladeshi context, before describing how the workshop was run with shrimp and prawn stakeholders in Khulna. Section 5 evaluates the Bangladeshi experience relative to some stated criteria, before Section 6 concludes.