Resilient Food Systems SHARED Toolbox: A toolkit for enhancing inclusive and evidence-based policy development


The Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidenced Based Decision Making (SHARED) Decision Hub, in partnership with FAO, designed and developed a toolkit to assist Resilient Food Systems (RFS) country teams in strengthening the connection between science, policy and institutions.

A long-standing issue is the challenge to facilitate effective integration across science, policy and practice, this is particularly the case across many countries in Africa. Tools, methodologies and processes to integrate science, policy and practice are not straight forward and often require country project teams to design and implement tailored approaches. This is further complicated by the lack of cross-sectoral collaboration, and accessible and reliable information.

The good news is that specific tools and best practices do exist to support institutional and policy dialogues and multi-stakeholder processes for sustainable agriculture and natural resources management.

The Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidenced Based Decision Making (SHARED) Decision Hub, in partnership with FAO have specifically designed and developed the toolkit in both English and French to assist Resilient Food Systems (RFS) country teams in strengthening the connection between science, policy and institutions across the local and national levels.

The process was initiated with a series of consultation interviews and was followed by a set of virtual training events customized to the priorities of the country projects such as forming multi-stakeholder platforms for food security and ecosystem resilience, catalysing cross-sectoral and cross-scale integration for sustainable land management and food security, or using advocacy techniques to improve land registration and sustainable land management, among many others. The engagements and learnings from these virtual training events allowed for practical examples, lessons learned and country case examples to be integrated within the toolkit.

The design of the toolkit aims to provide easy step-by-step tools, approaches and methods tailored to the country programs that can be applied into RFS country implementation plans. The layout of the tools, methods and approaches section covers two key thematic areas:

  1. Stakeholder processes and relationships, and
  2. Evidence into policy processes.

This toolkit is particularly useful if you are a:

  • Country project team and specifically the focal points for policy, institutional and multi-stakeholder work areas;
  • Relevant project focal points within partner government departments and development partners; or
  • Project monitoring and evaluation (M&E) specialists and other relevant partners as appropriate to the topic.

In July 2020, a two-part webinar training series was organised to build the skills of country project teams in enhancing policy and institutional engagement within their projects. The toolkit was used and demonstrated in this training. If you missed the training, you can watch it here.

For more information about the toolkit, download the latest brief

 

 


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