Murray, Grant DanielVirdin, JohnBernaus, Katrina2024-04-242024-04-242024-04-26https://hdl.handle.net/10161/30521With thirty-five percent of the world’s marine fish stocks overfished (FAO 2022), eco-recommendation programs have emerged as market-oriented solutions to promote sustainable fisheries, focusing on consumer behaviour to drive changes in fishing (Wakamatsu & Wakamatsu, 2017). However, most seafood certification and recommendation schemes focus on large-scale, industrial fisheries (Wakamatsu & Wakamatsu, 2017). While being small-scale is not inherently sustainable, recent discourse on the importance of small-scale fisheries to sustainable development (Franz et al., 2023) highlights the need to ensure small-scale fisheries are not left behind in defining sustainable seafood or meeting the requirements of existing sustainability definitions. Further, some seafood products are primarily fished by small-scale or community-based operations and therefore mostly left out of seafood certification or recommendations. Here, we explore the Ocean Wise sustainable seafood initiative, a Canadian eco-recommendation program typically applied to large-scale fisheries. Ocean Wise has struggled to include small-scale, rights-based, and Canadian Pacific salmon fisheries in their recommendation program. Their assessment process is also based on Western science and takes a desk-based approach, limiting the knowledge that Ocean Wise’s analysts can include in their assessment. Knowing many small-scale and rights-based fisheries are sustainable in their implementation and that local and Indigenous knowledge can provide substantial information on fishery sustainability, we seek to understand how to best incorporate small-scale salmon fisheries into the Ocean Wise assessment processes. We apply a case study of a chinook (suuhaa) near-terminal fishery on Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation territory in British Columbia, collecting interviews and performing qualitative analysis. Thereby, we investigate the utility of the Ocean Wise fishery recommendation program for a small-scale, rights-based Pacific salmon fishery and explore how local and Indigenous knowledge holders can supplement and modify the assessment and recommendation process. We gather that the Ocean Wise recommendation program is interesting and useful to respondents in our case study but comes with context-dependent challenges. Overall, the attitude towards the Ocean Wise recommendation program and the idea of a “sustainability” label for the chinook fishery was positive. In particular, fishers were responsive to a potential higher product value and expanded market opportunities. However, infrastructure challenges for the remote fishery would limit the success of only using an eco-recommendation to achieve such benefits. When comparing interview data with Ocean Wise’s framework, we found several synergies between the information interviewees were able to provide. Respondents also provide substantial information about where Ocean Wise Analysts can later seek information to bridge particular data gaps. Our results suggest that the Ocean Wise assessment framework prioritizes socio-ecological sustainability, ecosystem-based management, the inclusion of rightsholders, and responses to environmental risks when assessing small-scale fisheries. Emergent themes in our data also help illuminate how the Mowachaht Muchalaht fishing community defines sustainability and the indicators that may help measure social sustainability in a standardized assessment process. Further, we emphasize the need for an inclusive, adaptable, and fisher-centric approach to seafood recommendations that incorporates community engagement, partnership formation, traditional knowledge, and considerations for historical and contemporary restrictions of indigenous rights in the process. These recommendations are necessary to ensure the sustainability of small-scale fisheries and their inclusion in market-based conservation efforts like seafood recommendation programs. Overall, we recommend Ocean Wise alters their assessment process as follows: 1. Create modifications to emphasize the inclusion of rightsholders in fishery management and allow for multiple data types and knowledge forms to inform assessments 2. Incorporate socio-economic sustainability into the recommendation framework 3. Separate fishers from external, uncontrollable conditions in the assessment process 4. Take a project-based approach in assessments and form partnerships with small-scale fisheries 5. Keep in mind historical and contemporary restrictions of Indigenous rights to access resources in Canada while assessing fishery conditions 6. Coordinate efforts with other sustainable seafood programs to share resources and ensure consistency of modifications to assessment standards across the boarden-USFisherieseco-recommendationsmall-scale fisheriesIndigenous fisheriesPacific SalmonSeafoodMaster's project