Forum global sur la sécurité alimentaire et la nutrition (Forum FSN)

Message on behalf of Volli Carucci - World Food Programme (WFP), Italy:

Interesting initiative Luca & colleagues. A few inputs into this discussion and a few questions below.

-       There are already some resilience knowledge sharing platforms (called differently in specific contexts – localized to a few countries, some more ad-hoc) or planned ones and to develop a new one on resilience building for food security and nutrition may be a good idea but we need to make sure that it is either possible or desirable, considering all the work that is ongoing on this topic worldwide - some partners may see this as a duplication of theirs efforts or happily join if there is a true value addition.

-       It is not clear what the intention of the platform is – including with whom and on what? This relates to discussion 1 – i.e. it is critical to be clear about what is the main aim and focus of the platform. For example, will this platform focus on programme, policy, analysis and knowledge aspects of resilience building for food security and nutrition? Is the main aim to trigger effective programmes and policies? Too broad and we will end up surfing into an ocean of topics, sub-topics, etc, with the risk of not being used or becoming self-celebratory. Too narrow and it will probably duplicate some of the existing efforts. We are also not clear about the target audience? Will for example this platform target policy makers? Or will it include practitioners and analysts? Where is the gap at this point in time.  

-       As by definition resilience building is a partnership effort, it would be interesting to explore to make this initiative ‘partnership-driven’ (like the FSIN) – and not a single agency platform. If we aim to create a platform that will target different audiences, then we will need to make sure that different aspects of resilience building efforts are well reflected - from the planning, design and implementation of programmes, to measurement, and sharing good practices. This is what is really missing at the moment: a platform where different approaches are presented in a coherent manner, from planning to implementation and to measurement of results. So far, there is a lot on definitions, analysis and measurement – little or nothing on programming, integration, concrete activities. As resilience building is about layering efforts and strengthening complementarities, this will be particularly useful to have a better understanding of what are the various tools, approaches, programmes, analyses, activities in different contexts being implemented by different stakeholders and, in turn, it will help trigger actions on how to best integrate efforts. However, this is a lot of work and the risk is to stretch already scarce resources to fill a portal info.

-       Another important aspect is the governance of the platform. It would be extremely important to clarify upfront the main roles and responsibilities, especially if this is a partnership initiative. For example, who will be in charge of what? Will there be an editorial team? Will there be monthly multi-partner meetings? Costs? How to filter info, validate what is valuable and decide what is not?

Many thanks to FAO and Dominique for this timely discussion as Tulane University’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy (TU/DRLA) is currently hosting two learning forums in New Orleans for our academic partners in Africa as part of our USAID supported “Resilient Africa Network (RAN)” and our UNICEF supported “Resilient Malian Child.”  Over the past two weeks, our partners from Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa, Ghana, Mali, etc., have been able to share and discuss their qualitative and quantitative data addressing a range of challenges from climate variability, conflict, drought, flood, food insecurity, child well-being, etc.  We’ve also been able to have a dialogue on what has worked . . .  and what has not worked.  These exchanges have resulted in the exploration of resilience dimensions, pathways, and interventions, across 10 countries and cross-cutting issues. 

A critical discussion that is currently taking place is not only WHAT are the most salient findings emerging from the data to strengthen resilience, but WHO (in addition to the local innovation teams supported by the RAN) will take up these findings to strengthen programs and policies, and HOW can these university partners effectively disseminate their findings.  Therefore, we clearly see a need for a knowledge sharing/management platform (question 1).  With regard to question 2, I fully agree that the platform should be more than an information aggregate platform and should be an avenue for discussion and debate around what is useful and relevant . . . and what is not.  Therefore, the platform should have a mechanism whereby those who share their methods, data, and analysis can interact with consumers of that knowledge in a side forum that promotes respectful exchanges that can result in constructive feedback to strengthen future efforts to design, collect, implement, and evaluate resilience building activities.

Ky

Some week two ponderings...

As I read through the responses to date, a couple of things jumped out at me. One was the sense of information overload, contrasted with the need to map out the various km/ks/data and related platforms (and all that this implies in terms of data formats, agreements, etc.)

What I have not discerned is how the demand from the user has been clarified or articulated. Is there a role for design thinking here? It is easy to start setting out design ideas and requirements and march ahead, but designing with users might be a useful initial exercise. 

What do the rest of you think?

Nancy

Dear Dominic,

The attached docs are all about increased resilience (environmental, social and economic), land rehabilitation and reversing the "Cycle of land degradation and social deprivation". The problem is a complex set of interacting issues, requiring equally interactive interventions to address them. I have been working on this for 25 years and believe we now have an appropriate and tested (and perhaps unconventional) approach.

Best wishes

Roger

Prof RRB Leakey

Vice Chairman, International Tree Foundation

Twelve principles for improved food security within multifunctional agriculture and enhanced rural development

Dear all,

I am glad to read all this insightful contributions about knowledge sharing for resilience. I am working on Good Practice documentation and I have also cooperated in documenting Good practices on Resilience.

Here some of the main issues I have noticed by documenting good practices:

First, practices often lack of monitoring and evaluation, hence it is difficult to evaluate the results/impact of a practice and it is difficult to understand whether the practice is really a good practice or not. It might be useful sharing on the platform the indicators/criteria used to verify the improvements on resilience after the practice implementation.  I think it would be also useful, let the Technical Working Group using part of this platform to make progress on their discussions on resilience measurement harmonization and to share their results.

Second, there are difficulties related to Good Practices dissemination and even more for Good Practices implementation. In order to reach directly practitioners, the platform could produce learning material for training government and NGOs staff, university students, etc. It is also important to make a link with all these different actors, even by outreach and communication activities at the country level. Furthermore, we should reflect on how this knowledge, once shared and disseminated, will be implemented, also at the FAO level. What are the obstacles to the implementation of resilience good practices? An online platform could be also used as a tool for monitoring/validating the implementation in an interactive way: once a good practice is shared, people could upload their experiences on implementing the same practice, making comments and sharing their results.

Gathering, disseminating and applying good practices seems to be considered one of the key elements of this upcoming platform. Therefore, in order to design a more demand-oriented product, hence a more useful tool, I have just two small questions: What are the essential elements to be included in a Good Practice document for Resilience? What would be the most effective way to disseminate them?

My best regards,

Giulia

First and foremost, I would like to congratulate the resilience/FSN team for putting in place the knowledge sharing platform.  In order to avoid duplication, promote innovative ideas and ensure sustainability, it is important that all key stakeholders (donors, the academia, UN agencies, research institutions, NGOs, etc)  are actively involved and provided with regular updates through the platform.  This could be done through organizing bi-annual or quarterly meetings at global and regional levels to discuss resilience related issues.  By doing so, the platform will be able to get new ideas, remain vibrant and alive!

To be more effective, the platform should consider building synergies with  existing fora or platforms at global or regional levels such as the Resilience Development Forum for the Near East and North Africa, which brings together UN agencies, NGOs, the private and public sectors in the region to discuss resilience issues in countries affected by the Syria crisis.

In order to make the platform an information as well as service provider, I suggest that key institutions, bodies and persons with expertise and experience in resilience should be identified and networked to ease access to their expertise whenever needed.  In other words, consideration should be made to develop a roster or a network of experts on resilience that can be engaged or tapped whenever needed.  The platform could facilitate sharing of resilience good practices, development of resilience technical papers and act as one of the main sources of resilience experts.

In terms of capacity building, given the nature of its work, mandate and the current work on resilience, I believe FAO is well placed to strengthen capacities of Government institutions and other stakeholders on resilience either singly or in partnership with other resilience renown institutions and bodies such as Tulane University and the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPN), among others.  Capacity building tools can be developed and tailored depending on the target group.

Hello everyone:

I am sitting in an airport lounge traveling home from meetings held in Washington on resilience and wanted to pass on some thoughts to you. First I think that there are a number of networks that need to be linked up for sharing resilience information. These include the Food security Information Network which I mentioned in my last message, as well as the Food Security Network supported by TOPS, Agrilinks supported by USAID, and Rockefeller resources. All of these sites can be accessed through the internet and have plenty of material on resilience measurement. We must make sure that the lessons captured by these networks is shared across these sites because they have very different memberships. DFID is also setting up a knowledge sharing platform through BRACED that ODI is engaged in.

Second, given the cost of collecting primary data, we should encourage different agencies, donors and governments to make existing data available  for promoting resilience analysis. Many donors are already making these data available but more could be done on this.

Third, I think the real gap in sharing is about what are better practices in terms of interventions that actually lead to improved resilience. NGOs, governments and other implementing agencies are requesting such information all of the time. We need to share the tools we use to determine whether one practice is better than an alternative under what circumstances and in which context. With all of the resilience projects being implemented we need to share the lessons that are coming from implementation. We have a great opportunity to do this in real time as we see whether the programmes we are implenting are holding up under the impact of El Nino.

Fourth, we need to share better practices on how to do comprehensive assessments that lead to better design. Such assessments should help in developing a theory of change on what investments will lead to greater resilience in a given context so that measurement approaches can be designed to capture these changes. There is a long history on vulnerability assessments that we can  build upon to inform our assessments aimed at improving resilience. We need both light assessment approaches that rely on qualitative data and secondary data as well as more mixed method approaches that combine qualitative and quantitative data collection.

Finally we need to determine what are better practices for linking social protection to resilience programming.  For example if we know that shocks  are overwhelming a  community's ability to manage the shock, what are the key trigger indicators for activating a crisis modifiers for protecting assets. How do we determine the scale of the response, the timing and the duration. This information sharing would be critical as we struggle to respond effectively to the effects of El Nino.

Thanks. Tim

Dear all,

here are some of the resilience platforms I consult for my work and research:

1. Web Page on Resilience by Rockefeller Foundation: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/our-work/topics/resilience/ [focused on cities, but with interesting insights]
2. Linkedin community of practice on Resilience by PopTech: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/5074090 [user-led, 380 members]
3. Farmerfirst platform http://www.farmingfirst.org/resilience [unfortunately it is not being updated since 1.5 years]
4. World Bank supported Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) https://www.gfdrr.org/opendri

I think it is often missing a link to the tools, methodologies/approaches that are already available and (may be) linked with resilience issues. I refer not only to products developed from governmental organizations or academia, but also to the many community-driven projects that may be mobilized towards resilience building (e.g. the Missing maps project, an Open Street Maps project to develop accurate maps  of poor disaster-prone areas of our planet http://www.missingmaps.org/).

In terms of information and knowledge, it seems to me that there is a general lack of references to move beyond the general concept of resilience as a 'recovery from crises' only. I would expect further information on the way we could build redundancy into a society, since that is key to how a given community or city responds to disaster (for example providing resources to better link the agrifood and 'neighboring' system, as energy and transport).

Broadly speaking, I think that cross-cutting issues (e.g. gender, nutrition) are not adequately addressed. For this reason engaging established (online) community of practices may help in conceptualizing the way such issues can contribute to resilience building as well as in providing concrete means for their integration into resilience initiatives.

Finally, I think another missing link is that of the last mile. How can we transfer the knowledge from a web portal to the stakeholdes serving a community in need (and to the community itself)? How can we share complex concepts with them without these concepts/information being misunderstood? Leveraging multiple communication channels and building on existing networks could help disseminating knowledge, as well as engaging the communities in sharing their knowledge. I think it is very important to keep this in mind before/while designing the platform, instead of considering it as a separate issue - otherwise there may be bottlenecks for sharing and capturing knowledge outside of it dynamically.

Greetings!

Just a small end of the week thought about knowledge sharing in general that has been learned through a lot of experience:

• data and information sharing is critically important...
• data and information sharing increases in value when it comes out of a database and one can make sense of it in one's own context and
• see how to apply it to one's real work (HUGE implications for practical application - another commentor talked about leadership, but it is really about how KS and learning itself pragmatically fits into workflow)
• and discuss it with other peers (communities of practice, etc.)
• sharing back out the experiences of that contextualized knowledge to keep the knowledge flowing (continuous learning).

The second thought digs deeper into the sense making. Past experience may or may not be useful in future application, particularly in complex situations. So knowledge sharing has to be done in a way that there is clarity about the level of complexity. If there is low complexity, the KS can help for replication. If there is high complexity, we have to do a probe/test/probe approach which may be adapatation or something novel. (See the work of Dave Snowden)

So what does this mean in the context of resilience? From my distant view (I don't work on resilience directly) it seems to me that whatever approach you take, it has to have it's roots in complexity theory and practice. There is a significant difference in wanting to avoid reinventing the wheel, and adaptive, forward looking learning that allows improvement in a complex context. So when we think of "platforms" I hope we think far beyond technology and really dig into the business practices in these contexts. 

Thanks

Nancy