Read the full Executive Summary here:
Coming Soon
Read the full Shared Strategy Document here:
Coming Soon
Reflections from the Accelerating Social Responsibility in Seafood CASS Collective Action Lab
(June 2025 – February 2026)
Forced labor, exploitative recruitment, and unsafe working conditions remain persistent realities in seafood supply chains. Over the past decade, our sector has responded with a growing slate of projects, including human rights due diligence tools, social certifications, worker voice platforms, multinational treaties, and more. Yet, progress toward systemic change has been slower than many of us had hoped.
Applying the Sustainable Market Transformation Framework
This pilot Collective Action Lab (CAL) met from June 2025 to February 2026. It convened thirty Alliance members to apply the Sustainable Market Transformation (SMT) model, developed by Amsterdam-based consultancy NewForesight, to diagnose why social responsibility (SR) in seafood supply chains continues to lag behind environmental standards.
The SMT model holds that the problems we see in a market are symptoms of deeper underlying structures, including financial incentives, power dynamics, and collective beliefs that drive behavior and shape motivations beneath the surface. Addressing symptoms, as civil society tends to be structured to do, without changing underlying structures, tends to produce limited, temporary results.
Using this lens, the group worked backward from a co-developed “Future State Vision” of what a fully transformed seafood sector could look like to map the sector’s existing system loops, assess the maturity of existing SR initiatives, and brainstorm potential pathways to move forward towards a transformed seafood market.
Where Social Responsibility in the Seafood Sector Currently Stands
Following a decade of effort since landmark investigative reports first put forced labor in seafood into the global spotlight, the group’s assessment placed the sector between Phase 1 (Inception/Pilots) and Phase 2 (Competitive Advantage) of the four-phase SMT model.
Most SR initiatives remain small-scale, philanthropically funded, and limited in market uptake or measurable on-the-ground impact. There is no shortage of innovative and meaningful activity, but the movement has not yet reached the critical mass needed for systemic change.
Through an exercise facilitated by Lucas Simons, creator of the SMT model, the group identified three barriers holding the sector back:
- Insufficient urgency: Social issues in seafood lack the market-facing urgency that has driven environmental progress. Without urgency, pilots continue, but nothing scales.
- Weak market incentives: Bottom lines rule, and seafood economics reward sourcing cheaply. Externalized labor costs and the absence of accountability mechanisms mean front-movers bear a disadvantage rather than a gain.
- Sector fragmentation: Civil society groups, especially NGOs, compete for philanthropic funding rather than play coordinating roles. This misalignment creates mixed messaging to the seafood industry that perpetuates inaction (i.e., “The NGOs can’t agree on the best path forward, so why should we change?”).
One of the more candid conversations in the series centered on the role civil society plays in the current dynamic. A project-driven funding environment inadvertently incentivizes organizations to launch new initiatives rather than scale or consolidate existing, effective ones. Competing theories of change lead to a proliferation of tools and platforms that, while well-intentioned, can create confusion for seafood companies trying to figure out how best to engage.
How Can We Move Forward: Exploring Future Pathways
Two recurring and related themes emerged in group discussions centered on creating greater alignment across civil society in the sector and on exploring new funding models to move the sector towards institutionalization.
- Creating a shared theory of change to align the sector on a shared transition strategy rather than pursuing fragmented approaches.
- Exploring long-term, whole-ecosystem funding approaches based on a shared, sector-wide strategy capitalizes on NGOs’ comparative advantages and assures the decades of resources needed to push the seafood industry towards market transformation.
Potential supporting actions for NGOs include consolidating overlapping tools, focusing organizational effort on areas of comparative strength within a shared strategy, and strengthening NGO-to-NGO communication and coordination.
For funders, the ask is to explore shifts from project-based funding toward whole ecosystem and market-transformation models that reward scale and institutionalization rather than launch.
A decade of social responsibility work in seafood has built real knowledge, committed practitioners, and emerging momentum. Over the course of seven months, we identified that the challenge ahead is less about generating more activity and more about channeling existing efforts more coherently around shared goals, consistent messaging, and a collective strategy that the whole community can move together.
__
The CASS Accelerating Social Responsibility Collective Action Lab was facilitated by Gretchen Thusen, Program Certification Manager for Seafood & Packaged Goods at Fair Trade USA, in partnership with the CASS team.
For questions or to contribute to the shared strategy document, contact gthuesen@fairtradeusa.org atau meaghan@solutionsforseafood.org.
