Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs) are a form of private governance using seafood supply chains to reduce environmental impacts of fishing in some of the most challenged fisheries. Some FIPs are industry-led, others are championed by NGOs. They range across many different fishery types, in both high- and low-income settings. Their diversity is notable, and their proliferation remarkable. This rapid growth suggests FIPs are becoming a key feature of the fisheries governance landscape globally. Based on a global sample of 107 FIPs, we systematically examined their reported actions, the actors involved, and their achievements in terms of policy and practice outputs. The most common actions were dialogues with policy stakeholders, data collection, and educational efforts directed at fishers. Common policy outputs included development of management plans and/or a management body, and rules for limiting entry and increasing compliance. Practice related outputs were dominated by gear changes, and observer and traceability programs. Only crab and lobster FIPs engaged in sustained policy conversations as one of the most common actions. Shrimp and tuna fisheries report more engagement in testing and implementing changes to fishery practices. While supply chain actors are involved in all FIPs, retailers and 1st tier suppliers are relatively absent from FIP activities, and are primarily involved in rallying financial support or some policy engagement. Based on our analysis we discuss the opportunities and challenges FIPs will likely need to engage with to contribute to a global transition to more socially and environmentally sustainable fisheries. We outline key areas where further work is needed to understand how FIPs can improve their contribution to global fisheries governance in the future.

Private actors have become prominent players in the work to drive social and environmental sustainability transitions. In the fisheries sector, fishery improvement projects (FIPs) aim to address environmental challenges by leveraging the capacity of industry actors and using value chains to incentivize change. Despite globally rising FIP numbers, the incentive structures behind FIP establishment and the role of internal dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper uses institutional entrepreneurship as an analytical lens to examine the institutional change surrounding the management and trade of the Indonesian blue swimming crab and sheds light on how global market dynamics, local fishery dynamics, and value chain initiatives interact to affect the trajectory towards sustainability over time. We contribute to the institutional entrepreneurship framework by extending it with social-ecological dynamics, different actors’ ability to realize or resist change, and outcomes of institutional change. These additions can improve its explanatory power in relation to sustainability initiatives in fisheries governance and beyond. Our cross-scale historical analysis of the value chain shows not only the entrepreneurship behind the FIP’s establishment, and its institutional interventions, but also why these have been unsuccessful in improving the ecological sustainability of fishers’ and traders’ behavior. This provides valuable empirical grounding to a wider debate about industry leadership and private incentives for sustainability at large and helps disentangle under what conditions such initiatives are more (or less) likely to have intended effects. 

Stakeholder participation in environmental and marine governance has been a long-standing goal. Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs), aiming to use the seafood supply chains to reduce environmental impacts of fishing, are by definition a multi-stakeholder approach to governing fisheries resources, involving multi-actor participation as a core tenet. However, although fishers are generally seen as instrumental for fisheries governance systems, research suggests limited meaningful fishers’ participation in such projects. This paper explores how and when fishers participate in FIPs from around the world, using survey and interview data from FIP implementers. Findings indicate that fishers participate in diverse ways. Data collection and practical training for fishers are the activities in which fishers are most involved. Fishers are less engaged in developing FIP workplans and objectives compared to other activities, indicating that they are not involved in the early, and arguably formative, development process of the FIP. The lack of overall benefits to, and perceived large burden for, fishers were the main barriers to participation identified across all FIPs surveyed. While FIP implementers stress the importance of fishers’ involvement for the success of FIPs and expressed high ambitions to include fishers more, their confessed limited capacity and skills within the FIP to do so indicates a tension and flags some critical challenges for the FIP model. The paper ends by discussing the implications of these findings and reflecting on how fishers’ participation in FIPs can be improved in the future. 

Efforts to drive a transformation towards sustainability in fisheries production have increasingly been characterized by market-based approaches, such as certifications, ratings, traceability schemes and Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs). These approaches are often based on the assumption that economic gain and business demand for sustainable seafood are enough to create change along the value chain, from producers to suppliers. Economic theories of rationality have dominated many market interventions, although these theories often do not hold up in reality. At the same time, non-economic aspects of markets are undervalued in the design of sustainable incentives, even though well-established social theories of embeddedness suggest market actors are in fact embedded in social relationships, institutions and culture, and that these filter and structure trade while also shaping actors’ economic behaviour and impact on the ecosystem.  In this paper we provide a literature review of how the theory of social embeddedness has been applied in literature about fisheries trade. In light of the noted shortcomings, we argue that a wider acknowledgement and understanding of how economic behaviour is embedded within fisheries systems is necessary to modified and improve current market-based approaches. By analysing empirical insights from published case studies, and identifying and synthesizing key social structures that appear as particularly important for fisheries trade, we explore the social aspects of fishery trade that market-based approaches will likely need to consider and account for to improve their success. Our review shows that three aspects will likely to be particularly important to consider; i) the importance of social identity and structures (e.g., ethnicity) for trade relationships and market access; ii) different forms of trust and the roles it plays in influencing trade strategies; and iii) the importance of community as local norm-setting for trade and trade as community builder. We end with a discussion on how future research areas can promote better design of sustainability interventions.