What are the advantages and benefits of being a FSN Forum partner?
The FSN Forum is part of an expanding space of policy processes that are increasingly looking into multi-sector and multi-stakeholder engagement to be better equipped to face the complexity and content specificity of food security and nutrition issues. The Forum embodies FAO’s role of honest broker, contributing to the eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition at the global, regional and country level. Breaking silos between geographical and linguistic areas remains a challenge and the FSN Forum can be instrumental in fostering thematic and linguistic collaboration and integration.
The national and regional partners can benefit from the FSN Forum infrastructure, experience and existing membership. Specifically, the partners can:
- Broaden the outreach and increase the visibility of their programmes and projects;
- Increase the inclusiveness of national policies and strategies conducive to food security and nutrition;
- Better inform the target audience and collectively find solutions;
- Improve knowledge-sharing;
- Better connect with the global FSN agenda, and vice versa;
- Compliment programmes and projects with views gathered from global, regional and national expert communities;
- Engage key stakeholders in highly specific discussions by bridging hierarchical, thematic, sectoral and geographic differences;
- Introduce an innovative mechanism for policy dialogue in response to the increased expectations of citizens and other stakeholders to be involved in and be informed about policy processes, from the design phase to evaluation.
What are the services and products of the FSN Forum?
Regular services: policy-driven online discussions and online consultations; online surveys; webinars.
Services on request: network building, comprehensive analysis of discussion outputs, news circulation.
Standard products: weekly digests, summary reports, survey outputs, quarterly policy briefs.
Products on request: newsletters, bulletins, publications on case studies and lessons learned.
Partnering with the FSN Forum
To contribute to the policy processes at the global level, the FSN Forum has been working closely with a number of strategic partners, including key longstanding collaborations with the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of CFS, the ICN2 secretariat and the Post-2015 Development Agenda process among others. The FSN Forum conducted several debates for CFS, the outcomes of which contributed to the definition of the CFS programme of work and to key policy processes such as the guidelines on Responsible Agriculture Investments. For HLPE reports, the FSN Forum holds online consultations, which allow to benefit from the knowledge and practical experience of a wide set of stakeholders and also help in widening the geographical coverage of contributions and improve the diversity of sources.
At the regional level, the FSN Forum’s engagement with the FAO Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia (FAO-REU) yielded positive results in terms of expanding FAO’s dialogue with different stakeholders and fostering the debate on topics and issues of particular significance to the region. The Forum helps enhance outreach, build on existing targeted initiatives; complement face-to-face meetings with online interactions and link regional debates to the global discourse.
A particular close collaboration has been etsablished with the Project Developing Capacity for Strengthening Food Security and Nutrition in Selected Countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia funded by the Russian Federation. This collaboration served to extend the involvement of key stakeholders from the Project’s focus countries and the greater region in policy dialogue on how to strengthen food security and nutrition, while also linking them to experts from different disciplines all around the world.
Several other projects and institutions working on food security and nutrition in the Europe and Central Asia region have a component of stakeholder and partnership engagement that could find further synergies with the FSN Forum. Such institutions and initiatives among others are: the Eurasian Centre for Food Security (ECFS), the Central Asia and the Caucasus Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (CACAARI), the Social and Industrial Foodservice Institute (SIFI), the Regional Program for Sustainable Agricultural Development in Central Asia and Caucasus (CGIAR CAC Programme), European System of Cooperative Research Networks in Agriculture (ESCORENA), etc.
More efforts need to be made on all sides to track results of engagement and monitor impact that stakeholder dialogues have on policies, programmes, and technical outcomes for improved food security and nutrition.
We therefore invite regional, sub-regional and country organizations and initiatives to collaborate with the FSN Forum on their food security and nutrition agenda.
To become a partner, please contact us at: [email protected]