Ocean and Marine Stewardship in Africa: The Marine Stewardship Council Certification in Namibia and The Gambia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ocean and marine stewardship activities across different geographical areas contribute to global sustainability efforts, management, and conservation of ocean resources. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), through its sustainability standards and market-based mechanisms, rewards best practices for wild-caught seafood. To date, very few fisheries in Africa have participated in the MSC’s full assessment and obtained its certification. This paper explores the MSC certification scheme in the African continent by examining two case studies: the Namibian hake ( Merluccius capensis and M. paradoxus ) trawl and longline fishery and The Gambian sole bottom set gillnet fishery ( Cynoglossus senegalenis and Synaptura cadenati ). Drawing on document analysis, institutional ethnography, and extensive collaborative research with actors in these fisheries, we utilize three stewardship dimensions, i.e., Care-Knowledge-Agency, to qualitatively analyze how the MSC program provides an opportunity of actors to design ocean stewardship tools and promote fisheries sustainability in Africa. The Namibian fishery demonstrates a large-scale fishery with the adequate agency, technical knowledge, and interest in self-design improvements and stewardship, compared to The Gambian fishery, a small-scale fishery motivated to achieve certification but depends largely on external support to coordinate improvements and stewardship activities. The key motivation for Namibia and The Gambia actors to participate in the MSC’s assessment is the interest in increasing their international market access while ensuring ecosystem-based management and sustainability of the fisheries. Successful engagement with MSC requires establishing good governance structures, involvement of local actors, technical knowledge, and sufficient financial resources. The paper demonstrates the need for practitioners, government/market-actors, and academia to encourage sustainable seafood management in Africa by promoting various national and regional sustainability campaigns, environmental awareness programs and ocean stewardship initiatives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".