Incentive systems for improving performance are a part of everyday life. Acknowledgement of positive progress in natural resource management, for example, has become a tool widely endorsed by governments, NGOs and businesses. It fits the current push towards comanagement in that, whilst sanctions are important, incentives can drive individuals and groups to take on issues themselves, thus complementing the role of government. In the past ten years the main focus on incentive programs has been on market based incentives whereby some market benefit accrues to those that meet an agreed level of environmental performance. There is little doubt that such tools work and there is a growing interest in how to widen the scope of the whole concept to include other types of incentives and less demanding but still productive (in terms of driving improvement in agreed areas) approaches. FAO’s interest in this approach stems from its on-going promotion of good fisheries management as the basis for long term sustainable fisheries production. Good management helps protect fishing communities from the inevitable perturbations to catches and income that arise from natural changes in the environment and human induced changes such as market demand. In accordance with the FAO adopted definition of an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries there are both environmental and human aspects to creating well managed fisheries. This project proposes the adoption of a code (not a standard) called the Good Fish Code which is a so called ‘stepwise’ or improvers program designed to establish a series of agreed thresholds which define progress towards the two above aims. At each step there are defined incentives and these become more valuable the more a fishery progresses. As there are financial aspects to some of these incentives a system of external verification is proposed.