Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

How to monitor implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries?

This document summarizes the online consultation How to monitor implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries? held on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’s (FAO) Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum) from 17 February to 16 March 2020. The consultation was facilitated by the Small-Scale Fisheries Core Team from FAO in Rome, Italy.

The goal of this online consultation was to solicit views, suggestions and recommendations for monitoring the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines), which were endorsed in 2014 by the FAO Committee on Fisheries. Input received during this consultation will feed into FAO’s work on measuring progress in the implementation of the SSF Guidelines at the national level.

During the consultation, participants first shared ideas on how progress towards securing small-scale fisheries can be defined, selecting the most important chapters and paragraphs of the SSF Guidelines in this regard and discussing the geographical scales at which progress should be measured. Next, participants proposed indicators for assessing progress, with some of them sharing information on relevant monitoring and evaluation frameworks. Last, participants identified key elements of successful participatory monitoring and shared their own experiences in this field.

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