The Shifting Politics of Sustainable Seafood Consumerism

Seafood has emerged as a key testing ground for understanding the role of different value chain actors in driving sustainability. The conventional view, developed in the late 1990s, is that sustainable seafood is driven by the choices and practices of consumers in major importing markets, such as the United States and the European Union. This view led to the development of a range of boycott and buycott initiatives in the 2000s. Many of the buycott initiatives have been formalised into consumer-facing tools, such as certification, recommendation lists, and traceability. More recently celebrity chefs have also joined in, shaping sustainable seafood as cuisine. While these initiatives and tools initially assumed a demand-shapes-supply mode of political consumerism, they have allbroadened to include multiple modes of political consumerism. The future of thesustainable seafood movement is therefore dependent on a clearer articulation of diverse modes of political consumerism