Marine Stewardship Council: Fisheries app

Marine Stewardship Council certifies sustainable fisheries against a global standard. The MSC Fisheries App is the specialist application that manages the assessment lifecycle and surfaces fishery information to the public — distinct from the main marine-stewardship-council.org website. PretaGov has built and run it since 2016.

Background

MSC's certification process for a fishery is years long, document-heavy, and involves auditors, fishery clients, stakeholders and the public. The data model is unlike a typical CMS: each fishery has version history, audit reports, surveillance reports, objections, public comment periods, and a status that moves through clearly-defined stages.

The main MSC public site is the right tool for marketing, news and standards documentation. It was the wrong tool for managing the certification dataset itself. A separate application was the right answer.

Solution

The Fisheries App is a custom database-backed application that publishes structured fishery records to the public while supporting the back-office workflow MSC's certification team needs. It integrates with the broader MSC content ecosystem — auditors and other publication pipelines — while keeping the certification-specific data model in its own home.

Since the initial 2016 build, the app has been continuously evolved: a substantial 2021 face-lift to modernise the editor experience and front-end presentation, and a 2025 platform migration to AWS App Runner to give MSC a modern container-based hosting profile with simpler scaling and lower idle cost.

Why this is a separate case study

MSC has two distinct relationships with PretaGov: the main marine-stewardship-council.org public site, and the Fisheries App. They share a client, but the technical and content patterns are different enough that they're documented separately. The pattern repeats elsewhere in our practice — when a client has both a public site and a custom application, we treat them as two distinct stories rather than collapsing them into one.