Rendering social: rethinking the role of shrimp aquaculture certification in Thailand

This thesis studies shrimp aquaculture certification schemes that provide technical standards as a guidance for best practices and coordinate the assessment of the performance of producers against these standards by experts. However, the effectiveness of certification as an improvement tool is being challenged. For instance, limitations in the accessibility of certification for a broad section of producers, proliferation of standards creating confusion for producers and consumers alike, and the limited evidence of material improvement resulting from standard compliance. These limitations are studied in four case studies on sustainability standards and shrimp aquaculture in Thailand. This thesis argues that these questions logically emerge from rendering certification as a technical tool of improvement that translates expert knowledge to guide, impose the rules upon and set the conditions for producers. Therefore this thesis argues that certification is fundamentally a social process. In doing so, this thesis reimagines the role and contribution of certification as an agent of change that may reflexively shape the political, economic and social relations between key actors and social structures to create an enabling improvement for sustainable shrimp aquaculture.