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