Social acceptability and governance of aquaculture developments. Issues, challenges and recent experiences[Acceptabilité sociale des développements aquacoles. Enjeux et expériences locales]

Marine aquaculture is facing a wide range of challenges, which threaten further development, competitiveness and sustainability. Because producers develop their activity within a complex regulatory, institutional and social framework, social constraints become major issue beyond of profitability and environmental ones. Understanding the social bottlenecks that lead to the stagnation of aquaculture development has been an area of study frequently overlooked. But beyond the classic approaches of spin-offs or jobs, which more often provide material for communication or promotion of a sector rather than questioning its sustainability, the social dimensions of aquaculture development can also be understood in its wider public dimension. The social acceptability as an understanding of the acceptability of aquaculture development by the society and not limited to its solely social dimension, allows for integrating ecological, economic and social dimensions of Aquaculture Development to re-drive this development to a more sustainable path. It allows to reposition governance at the core of sustainability and address the territorial dimension of aquaculture development by co-constructing the aquaculture vision of a territory before entering into sites selection and carrying capacity. It rather pledges for an integrated approach of the carrying capacity concept encompassing the ecological, the economic and the social carrying capacity. Based on the institutional dimension and acceptability of aquaculture, the conditions for implementing such an approach to aquaculture development are under question and call for some recommendations: i) support countries in developing strategic aquaculture development plans and include provisions to improve the social acceptability; ii) the establishment and implementation of good governance mechanisms, iii) the fostering of the adoption of appropriate policy instruments and decision-making processes in order to enhance participatory approaches and open and broad dialogue with the industry, all aquaculture subsector and local communities; and improve general public knowledge and perceptions of aquaculture.