The recent effort by two global organizations, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Anglo-Dutch multinational, Unilever, to establish an independent Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) as a conservation partnership to create market incentives for sustainable fishing has attracted a great deal of attention-as well as controversy. In this dossier, the pros and cons of the MSC initiative are argued out in a series of articles that first appeared in SAMUDRA Report, the triannual publication of the ICSF.