Sustainability Governance in Türkiye's Aquaculture Sector: Exploring Strategic Interdependencies Through an Expert-Based Interaction Framework

Abstract

Aquaculture development increasingly depends on complex relationships among environmental, institutional, regulatory, and market-related factors rather than on isolated strategic processes. This study examined sustainability governance in T & uuml;rkiye's aquaculture sector through an expert-based interaction framework. A structured SWOT-derived assessment framework was applied involving 25 experts representing academia, public institutions, producer organizations, and the aquaculture industry. Twenty strategic factors equally distributed across strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats were evaluated through pairwise assessments of perceived strategic connectedness. Aggregated interaction matrices, orientation-level comparisons, subgroup evaluations, and robustness analyses were conducted to examine strategic interdependencies within the sector. The findings revealed moderately strong interaction patterns distributed across all four strategic orientations. Among the four strategic orientations, the Strength-Opportunity (SO) orientation exhibited the highest mean interaction score (3.84), followed by Strength-Threat (ST; 3.66), Weakness-Opportunity (WO; 3.43), and Weakness-Threat (WT; 3.19). These results indicate that sustainability-related governance challenges are embedded within interconnected environmental, institutional, regulatory, and market-related processes rather than isolated strategic domains. Sustainability certification, export competitiveness, institutional support mechanisms, regulatory adaptation, and environmental pressure emerged as the most prominent components within the overall interaction structure. These findings reflect expert-perceived strategic associations rather than empirically verified causal relationships among sectoral factors. Reliability and robustness analyses indicated substantial consistency across expert evaluations and limited sensitivity to alternative scoring conditions. Overall, the findings indicate that maintaining long-term sustainability in export-oriented aquaculture systems depends not only on production performance but also on institutional coordination, regulatory adaptation, and the effective integration of sustainability-oriented governance practices.