This paper provides one account of how fish farmers decided whether to switch to a cleaner production method, i.e. organic farming. Prior research on cleaner production implementation would suggest that going organic would be regarded as difficult, expensive, a reaction to external pressures, driven by changing environmental regulations or a consequence of a value shift by key actors in the organization.

However, the farmers did not describe such a process. The decision to go organic was intuitive using general agricultural decision heuristics, based on market price forecasts. The shift to organic production was unproblematic and relatively inexpensive. It was not a reaction to protest movements nor was organic salmon viewed as a safer, healthy, product. The decision was not subjected to systematic accounting evaluations. The shift to organic production was driven by the prospect of higher market prices and securing sales in a climate of declining market prices and volumes for ‘unorganic’ salmon. Instinctively, farmers felt that the costs of being certified as organic would be justified in terms of higher prices, avoiding a predicted drop in prices and increased overseas competition.

Salmon farming in Scotland emerged around 30 years ago and since then has grown substantially, supporting economic and social development in the most remote parts of Scotland. During that same period salmon farming became an important symbolic battleground between business and environmental pressure groups. Salmon farming is perhaps an unusual environmental cause-celebre, as it differs in terms of volume, ownership structures, raw materials used, end product, location of operations from other environmental hate figures, e.g. Nuclear Energy, Chemical Companies, Oil Companies, Car Manufacturers, Fast Food Chains. Much of the debate on salmon farming takes place in the media gaze. The newspaper headlines at the beginning of this paper are part of the media response to a recent scientific study that reported Scottish Salmon as so heavily contaminated that eating more than six portions a year could significantly increase the risk of cancer.

There is general consensus that salmon farming has the potential to negatively impact on sensitive marine coastal ecosystems and consequently is subject to a complex network of laws, regulations, and voluntary certification schemes. The Scottish Salmon Growers Association (SSGA) has identified 369 pieces of European legislation affecting aquaculture. However, there is considerable disagreement on the effectiveness of this regulatory regime.

Much of the discourse surrounding the salmon sector is concerned with the safety of consuming farmed salmon. Chemical additives and pollutants in salmon-feed, chemical residues from disease and parasite treatments, artificial flesh colouring pigments are the subject of constant debate over their impact on human health. The quality of the farmed salmon relative to wild salmon in terms of taste, texture, vitamins, fat content, essential fatty acids, is also hotly debated. Debates also rage on the use of genetically modified salmon and the use of genetically modified soy oil in salmon feed.

The contested nature of salmon farming illustrates many of the characteristics described by Beck’s Risk Society thesis and our interviews revealed risk as a recurring theme. In this paper we do not attempt to resolve the salmon farming problematic, but report on how farmers perceive and manage their risks in the field (or more correctly in the sea). In particular we focus on the adoption of one risk management strategy, organic production methods.

Organic salmon production should significantly reduce environmental risks to the local marine ecology. Organic salmon should be free from chemical residues, removing many of the health risks from its consumption. Organic salmon should not be genetically modified nor consume genetically modified ingredients. As organic salmon should be reared in conditions as close as possible to wild salmon, differences in the quality should be minimised. On the surface organic salmon production addresses the criticisms of conventional salmon farming. This paper investigates the decision processes of farmers in relation to organic production, attempts to understand the absence of environmental accounting and suggests how environmental accounting may improve risk governance in the salmon farming sector.

Risk was identified as a main theme in the interviews. In particular, the contested perception of the risks associated with salmon farming and consumption by different stakeholders. How risk was discussed, identified, measured, communicated, denied and governed by those interviewed was largely consistent with the literature on socio-cultural risk perspectives and in particular with Beck’s Risk Society thesis. This section will provide a brief overview of this extensive literature, concentrating on the relevant features for our particular empirical study. This overview will provide the basis for evaluating our findings, a potential reason for the absence of environmental accounting and a framework to model how environmental accounting may improve risk governance in the salmon farming sector.

Socio-cultural perspectives on risk emphasise the social and cultural contexts in which risk is understood and negotiated. Risk has become an increasingly pervasive concept of human existence in western societies. It is seen as something that can be managed through human intervention and is linked with concepts of choice, responsibility and blame. All knowledge about risk is bound to the socio-cultural contexts in which it is generated. A risk is not a static, objective phenomenon, but is constantly (re)constructed and (re)negotiated as part of the network of social interaction. Understanding risk phenomena requires recognizing the embeddedness of risk perceptions, differences in the perception of different actors, competing logics, institutional structures, and power dynamics in different contexts.

Judgments about risk are not simply cultural variations of objective dangers or hazards. What is deemed a risk in one context may not be in another. The task of constructing a risk object is a discursive process, performed in specialised texts and/or in public arenas and involves building networks of new and/or existing heterogeneous risk objects. It often involves intense struggles over meaning, particularly in relation to those actors who are deemed to be responsible for the risk object. For example, Campbell and Liepins (2001) describe the discursive process in developing organics standards in New Zealand. This involved shifting notions of the risks that these standards were attempting to manage.

The construction of risk objects is invariably accompanied with social and political struggles over the power to control these risk objects. These struggles can be between different groups of ‘legitimate-experts’, for example, biologists and economists over the ‘power’ of their logic in dealing with the risk object, or between ‘legitimate experts’ and ‘non-legitimate-experts’, for example, ‘food safety regulators’ and ‘consumers’. Particularly in contemporary Western Societies, these struggles are conducted via the mass media, which in themselves amplify or construct new risk perceptions in the wider populace. These debates among scientists and other experts include fundamental disagreements on issues such as: what constitutes adequate proof that a phenomenon is hazardous; the acceptability of different hazards; and the consequences of attempting to control the hazard. While disputes over the validity of technical data may contribute to such debates, it is the different systems of values and ways of seeing that shape experts’ judgments of these data. Experts do not tend to acknowledge the situated and localised nature of their risk deliberations or the social and ecological implications of their ontological and epistemological assumptions.