Is existing legislation supporting socially acceptable aquaculture in the European Union? A transversal analysis of France, Italy and Spain

According to the European Commission, aquaculture is among those maritime sectors contributing to the blue economy due to its potential for generating jobs, business opportunities and, most importantly, for ensuring food security in Europe. In 2014, EU member states set new strategies to support sustainable aquaculture and ambitious targets of productions to be met by 2020 in the three segments, marine fish, freshwater fish and shellfish. A recent assessment made by the European Commission concludes that some countries might not be able to attain the established goals and this paper presents an in‐depth analysis of such strategies to identify the social constraints hampering aquaculture growth in France, Italy and Spain as well as the measures established to overcome them. Most of the identified issues are related to the social acceptability of local communities, local stakeholders and consumers, suggesting that this still represents an unsolved issue hampering aquaculture development in Europe. In fact, our results show that (a) the sector suffers from a bad image related to its environmental impacts; (b) a lack of integrated spatial planning is leading to increasing conflicts with other activities; and (c) there is predominance of top‐down consultation mechanisms. It is concluded that there is not a single solution to enhance social acceptability of aquaculture since this depends on a number of social, economic and environmental factors that may differ from site to site, and countries need to adopt a more integrated approach where concerns of local communities and stakeholders are understood and taken into account