Driving change with innovation policies

 Integrated, co-created policy, governance and decision-making central to transforming agri-food systems. FAO advances future-informed, evidence-based policy, innovative governance, and decision-making for agrifood innovation, supported by innovative financial and monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) tools.

FAO works with countries to design integrated policy and investment frameworks that align governance mechanisms, funding instruments and innovation priorities. These frameworks are co-created to fit national contexts and societal missions such as climate resilience, biodiversity, food security, urban agriculture and agroecology.  To advance smoothly with transformative outcomes in innovating, we promote innovation governance, and in particular multistakeholder governance mechanisms as the holistic approach of establishing the dynamic arrangements of actors, institutions, rules, and policy instruments to steer, promote, and sustain innovative activities.

Innovation Policy Labs (IPLs) are one of the methodologies applied, creating participatory spaces for collaborative policy-making and anticipatory governance, alongside policy dialogues, foresight studies and global exchanges. Embedding foresight and UN 2.0 capabilities, they enable governments to anticipate change, de-risk novelty and address complexity.