Shaping the aquaculture sustainability assemblage: Revealing the rule-making behind the rules

- Draws attention the rule-making processes underlying eco-certification schemes.
- It identifies rule-making as a site of contestation over the definition of sustainability.
- It shows how multiple rule-making sites interact with each other.
- Reveals that rules structuring sustainability remain in flux.
- Draws on empirical data from three sustainable aquaculture rule-making processes.

Certification programs yield global assemblages of producers, consumers, investors, markets, and certifiers that are built around rules that define sustainability. In studying the dynamics and impacts of certification, scholars often refer to “the rules” underlying certification in a manner that makes them seem like immutable mobiles: permanent and unchanging objects that are produced by technical, expert-driven processes and that can be applied in diverse places and contexts. In this paper, we turn attention to the rules and rule-making processes underlying certification to demonstrate the unstable, changeable and contested underpinnings of sustainability assemblages. We explore the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-sponsored multi-stakeholder Aquaculture Dialogues, an unusually open and participatory experiment in “green” rule-making. Our analysis reveals that rules are never final. Instead, intersections between rule-making bodies and the structure of rule-making procedures create critical debate and contestation over the definition of “sustainability” that structures the aquaculture sustainability assemblage, and over who can and should be empowered to do the defining. This approach enables scholars of certification to rethink the ontology of certification rules as part of, rather than an external ordering principle for, the dynamic and contested nature of sustainability assemblages.