Initiatives for the sustainable development of aquaculture have so far focused on theproduction of codes of conduct, of best management practices, of standards etc., most ofwhich have been developed by international organisations, the industrial sector and nongovernmental organisations. They were, to a large extent, produced using a “topdown” process and inspired by models from intensive industrial shrimp and sea fish farming(mainly salmon). However, most of global aquaculture production comes from small- andmedium-sized farms, essentially in Asia which contributes 92% of the total worldaquaculture production volume. The objective of this article is to define the contours ofsystemic typologies that are able to express the sustainability conditions of aquaculturesystems. The proposed approach builds on surveys of aquaculture systems which differ interms of their biogeographical nature (temperate/tropical and north/south countries) ortheir farming techniques and their governance systems. This work is a prerequisite to anyattempt at an individualised and comparative evaluation of specific aquaculture systemsfrom either global or territorial viewpoints. In order to go beyond the cleavage of atypology based on the differentiation between developed and developing countries, threetypologies were produced. These typologies allow for discriminatory variables to beidentified such as for example the marketing methods or the pace of innovation: astructural typology, a functional typology and a systemic typology. Finally, therepresentations of aquaculture activity and of its sustainability that producers have ofthe 4 different types that emerge from the systemic typology were recorded andanalyzed.