Broadening the sustainable seafood movement—systemic and enabling approaches to transform blue food

The global appetite for environmentally sustainable and just seafood is expected to grow in coming decades. However, the sustainable seafood movement, including private governance tools like certifications and recommendation lists has yet to transform fisheries and aquaculture on a large scale. At the same time, alternative voluntary governance approaches have taken shape, each aiming to guide production and consumption toward greater sustainability. In this article, we delve into less-explored yet potentially promising approaches to seafood sustainability, which could help address current limitations to achieving sustainable seafood. Through a critical review, we have mapped and characterised emerging strategies to sustainable seafood and their theory of change and identified three clusters: (i) private sector pre-competitive collaborations (ii) landscape-based approaches and (iii) relational approaches. These are described through looking back on historical developments and giving examples of previous and current implementation, as well as describing how they address key limitations identified from the certifications and seafood rating scheme approaches. We then overlap the approaches onto transformation literature and categorise them into ‘systemic’ or ‘enabling’ approaches to transformation in the food system. Enabling approaches focus on building capacities for change, while systemic approaches target key features of social-ecological systems for focused transformation. From here, compatibilities between approaches are discussed—whether there are fundamental tensions and when these might arise. Finally, based on the literature, we outline a potential new trajectory for the sustainable seafood movement, grounded in pluralism, collaboration, and trust.