Marine Stewardship Council sustainability certification in developing countries: Certifiability and beyond in Kerala, India and The Gambia, West Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) features small-scale and developing country fisheries prominently in promoting its sustainability program, yet the problem of low levels of certification in developing country fisheries is a long-standing and important issue in marine policy. The objective of this paper is to better understand small-scale, developing country fishery experiences with the oldest fisheries certification program globally. It does so primarily through a comparative case study of fisheries that were among the first in their wider regions to engage the program. The paper assesses fisheries in Kerala, India, and The Gambia, West Africa, detailing the evolution of engagement with MSC sustainability certification. Analytically, the paper assesses experiences, successes and frustrations in these cases across ecological, economic, social, and institutional dimensions—categories that have gained widespread appeal in sustainability studies. The paper finds that what makes a fishery certifiable or uncertifiable is not just levels of performance against the sustainability certification standard but also a broader range of relations and interactions that influence paths of development and change in fisheries. We, therefore, call for more explicitly integrated and critical explanatory social science and interdisciplinary evaluations of fisheries certifiability, broadly understood as impacted by diverse ecological, social, economic and political factors and relationships. Technical certifiability, social-ecological certifiability, and uncertifiability will be introduced to broaden our understanding.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".