Advocacy Methods

You have a unique opportunity to be a powerful catalyst for policy change. With your first-hand knowledge of the complexities of global seafood supply chains, your voice is essential in shaping policies that are both ambitious and achievable. By sharing your industry perspective, you can help make regulatory processes more inclusive and grounded in real-world experience. When you engage with others impacted by policy—including governments, communities, and workers—you contribute to better decision-making and help ensure stakeholder needs are accurately understood. Your participation also builds transparency and trust in the regulatory process, fostering collaboration and long-term solutions.

To facilitate this bridge between market and government actors, there are a number of tools that can be used to initiate effective dialogue between stakeholders, including but not limited to:

Joint sign-on letters
Individual advocacy letters (including public comments)
In-person or virtual meetings (individual, or group)
Roundtable dialogues
Workshops
Testimonies
Webinars
Op-Eds

These tools provide various ways for the industry to communicate its perspectives, share experiences, and influence the development of policies.

Mechanisms for Advocacy

Policy advocacy is inherently collaborative, requiring the cooperation of multiple stakeholders, including the seafood industry, NGOs, government agencies, and even local communities. Effective advocacy often involves building partnerships that bridge diverse interests – from conservation efforts to economic considerations – ensuring that policies are balanced and inclusive. As such, there are a number of mechanisms/avenues by which advocacy can take place:

Industry associations and coalitions

Forming or joining industry groups can create a collective voice that can more effectively influence policy decisions as well as create a space for unifying around common goals and consistent messaging

Multi-stakeholder initiatives

Participation in forums, workshops, working groups, and can bring together otherwise disparate groups to foster dialogue, build consensus, and ensure voices of all impacted parties are considered when discussing and developing policy recommendations

Public awareness campaigns

Initiatives to inform and educate stakeholders (including policymakers) about the need for robust, well-enforced seafood regulations can build public support, which, in turn, can drive policy change

Collaborations with other industry and/or NGO leaders

Partnering with other industry and NGO stakeholders can support a pooling of resources, sharing of knowledge, and amplification of each other’s advocacy efforts as well as bridge potential gaps between different sectors in order to more effectively push for comprehensive governance reform

Research and data sharing

Investing in and disseminating research, papers, articles, or other public material that highlights the benefits of specific regulations or even a company’s experiences complying with seafood policies can be a powerful tool in persuading policymakers and regulators

Choosing the Right Advocacy Strategy

While advocacy will look different for each stakeholder and vary by topic. Some of the factors to consider when pairing an issue or topic with an advocacy strategy include:

The complexity of a topic or issue, regulation, or issue at hand
Representativeness (or lack thereof) of stakeholder perspectives
The amount of effort it would take to produce or engage in a particular method of advocacy (i.e., its cost in time, effort, and political capital)
The level of consideration a particular method of advocacy would garner from policy implementors, policymakers, and administrators (i.e., its expected impact)
Past experiences engaging particular agencies or lessons learned taken from parallel efforts, initiatives, or formal/informal dialogues