Dear Friends,
I have been following this discussion but have hesitated to contribute because I cannot point to well substantiated success stories at country level, although I have been involved at various times in being a minor player in policy change processes in many country situations. Nor do I feel that, as implied in the introduction, “information” itself is the key to inducing policy change. What I think we need to look at is how new ideas emerge and are successfully propagated, and what we do to improve and accelerate these processes.
One implication might be that our own FSN “community” should move from simply sharing ideas and experiences and making comments on CSF draft papers to becoming a group of advocates for policy changes related to its host Organization’s 5 strategic objectives. I think that we have to ask ourselves how we can become catalysts for change.
To understand this, It might be interesting to take a careful look at the strategies and tools applied in two highly successful recent moves to induce radical policy changes – the Jubilee 2000 campaign on debt forgiveness (http://advovacyinternational.co.uk) and the international campaign to ban land mines (www.icbl.org). Both of these succeeded in moving rather obscure topics very quickly to the top of the international agenda, mobilizing “people power” to put pressure on governments and international institutions to commit to reversing conventional policies. The aims were very clear and expressed in simple terms that everyone could understand. They appealed to people’s sense of justice and fairness, and the campaigns were managed with great skill, using most of the communication skills available at the time.
Avaaz and other internet petition-raising programmes, are, I suppose, the modern-day heirs to Jubilee 2000 and ICBL.
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In the food security area, it would be interesting to make a careful review of what has worked – or not worked.
The idea of the “Right to Food” gained initial recognition in the 90’s and has been propagated with reasonable but still quite limited success over the last 10 years following the launch of the Voluntary guidelines, in the sense that a growing number of countries are building the RtoF into their constitutions. But it remains quite a complex concept with legal connotations, and hence it has been difficult to generate wide popular support for it and I suspect that it is hard to show a correlation between a country’s subscription to the RtoF and nutrition improvements. Lula was much more successful in creating the immediate emergence of public and political support for ending hunger in Brazil by simply pledging to ensure that, as a result of the Zero Hunger Initiative, every Brazilian would enjoy 3 meals per day by the end of his term as President - a goal that everyone could understand and work towards. (Interestingly it was only several years after the launch of Zero Hunger that Brazil adjusted its constitution to incorporate the right to food as a national objective thus guaranteeing long-term commitment to achieving Lula’s vision).
I am totally convinced that hunger and most other forms of malnutrition can be eradicated very quickly. The great communication task is not so much to share information and ideas on this amongst the “cognoscente” as we are now doing, but to create a broad constituency of public support for the very simple idea that within 10 years it should be a perfectly normal function of any society to see that all its people are able to eat healthily.
Achieving this goal may, like Brazil’s Zero Hunger, require 30 or 40 well-coordinated component programmes involving, food production, nutrition, education, social protection and so on – but that is for the technical people to work out and the more that communicators are drawn into the details, the less successful they will be in creating needed support for the major policy changes this goal implies.
Perhaps members of the Forum could be invited by our Secretariat to work together in advocating this idea in the run-up to ICN2, using the wide range of different tools available to them.
Too down to earth?
Best wishes,
Andrew
Andrew MacMillan