Principles and Tools to Foster Social Acceptability of Aquaculture Development ; Principes et Outils pour Favoriser l'Acceptabilité Sociale du Développement Aquacole

International audience ; Within the Blue Growth Strategy, aquaculture is perceived and quoted as a sector that has a high potential for sustainable jobs and growth and that has to be developed. Despite a strong initial growth at the beginning of the Blue Revolution, European aquaculture, and in particular marine fish farming, began to stall and stagnate. The new drivers initiated by the Blue Growth seem to have great difficulty in reversing that trend and progressing towards the stated objectives in terms of production volumes, in the light of the production statistics over the last decade. Marine socio-ecosystems are complex systems, they demonstrate non-matching scales, surprises (non-linearities), interconnection with other systems, memory effects, choke points and so on. This complexity calls for more integrated assessment through integration of existing knowledge: integration of sciences (among disciplines), integration of sciences and society, integration of sciences and policy and integration of uses. If some integrated assessment framework were developed such as the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries, and its counterpart for aquaculture the Ecosystem Approach to Aquaculture, in practice they never really reach the required level of integration. In particular, by focusing on the ecological carrying capacity and leaving aside the social and institutional dimensions and especially the governance issues of these socio-ecosystems.While much effort has been put into technological innovations and the measure of their impact on farms, relatively little has been put into institutional innovations. But beyond of technical and profitability issues, social acceptability is now considered as one of the main bottlenecks to aquaculture development. As already underlined, existing assessment frameworks are not able to catch that key dimension of aquaculture development. There is then a need to propose and develop such an assessment framework of Social Acceptability (SA) of aquaculture development. In addition to the ...