Governance for Sustainable Development of Food and Agriculture
Governance at all levels is defined by the processes through which public and private actors articulate their interests; frame and prioritize issues; and make, implement, monitor and enforce decisions.
Improving governance for sustainable development of food and agriculture, and thus accelerating the achievement of all SDGs, is more than ever a driving concern for FAO Members, their development partners and stakeholders.
FAO’s role and work in governance operates at different levels: At the global level, FAO is the world’s pre-eminent institutional platform for intergovernmental and multi-stakeholder policy dialogue, generating inter-governmentally agreed treaties, declarations, norms and standards, as well as voluntary guidelines.
At the regional level, FAO facilitates regional and subregional collaboration for the harmonization of common objectives, instruments and programmes, adapting and operationalizing broader glob-al norms and guidance and enabling more effective regional collective action.
At the national level, FAO helps Member countries identify, analyse and formulate solutions to key governance challenges for sustainable development of food and agriculture.
FAO work in governance seeks to strengthen capacities for inclusive, transparent and effective decision-making and action, based on the internationally agreed norms of FAO and the United Nations.
Key messages
Governance and political economy issues underlie most sustainable development challenges, constrain policy choices, and, when ignored or misunderstood, are a persistent source of policy failure. Policy design must be closely linked to govern-ance analysis, and adapted to national preferences and priorities as well as institutional and political economy realities. The dynamics of institutional change in specific contexts are complex and uncertain, but analysis is essential for assessing the possibilities and formulating strategies to achieve transformational change.
To be effective, policy formulation must be systematically linked to governance analysis, based on evidence and sound methods. Understanding and taking into account relevant governance and political economy concerns – such as the diversity of interests among stakeholders, power imbalances in decision-making processes, and institutional rigidities that constrain capacities for action – are essential requirements.
Institutional mechanisms are required to address adverse impacts and trade-offs between competing policy objectives. Alternative policy choices, resource allocations and other decisions related to food and agriculture often involve trade-offs between economic growth, social equity and sustainable use of natural resources. Innovative governance mechanisms can help reposition different sectors and actors as partners – rather than competitors – in coordinated action towards food systems transformation.
Governance improvement is the result of an iterative and adaptive collective learning process, driven by the search for answers to practical problems. Transformational change is a complex process that unfolds over time. Many stakeholders have higher stakes in some aspects of the status quo and, due to power imbalances, their special interests often distort outcomes. Iterative learning processes create opportunities for informed changes in intervention strategy and can lead to realistic and sustainable long-term solutions.
Engaging the range of stakeholders and facilitating partnerships are essential tasks in the governance process. Establishling the societal frameworks needed to eliminate hunger and ensure food security and nutrition for all remains an essential responsibility of states, but the way this responsibility is carried out needs to be adapted to changing circumstances, knowledge, needs, risks and opportunities. Broad social participation is needed to sustain the efforts, even in the face of changes of government, limited budgets and socio-economic and climatic shocks. Cross-sectoral coordination and networks of communication within government as well as across the public-private divide are indispensable means for facilitating the ef-fectiveness of policies and food systems outcomes.
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