License to Engage: Gaining and retaining your social license in the seafood industry/ A handbook of available knowledge and tools for effective seafood industry engagement with communities

‘Community engagement is important to your seafood business and sector because:

• The values held by stakeholders who can affect your business are important.
• These stakeholders can and will affect your business directly or indirectly, if they feel that your business is not meeting important values or standards.
• The way you operate your business has value and generate benefits for communities, like supporting tourism, employment, work experience, community industry diversity. • It’s time to identify these shared values and start talking about them. The community in general want to know more about the industry and have clear reasons to feel proud of it.
• Aligning your business values with those of your stakeholders and community decreases conflict and eases the flow of business, meaning it makes good business sense. Conflict over the seafood industry’s ‘social license to operate’ is a call to seafood businesses to do business differently – to do the business of community engagement’

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