Last week I attended a workshop hosted by several French institutions on the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The motivation for the workshop was the increasing attention paid to CFS after its 2009 reform, which elevated the visibility and capacity of CFS and enabled wider participation by non-states.
The new CFS is seen as a model of a new tool for global governance: a multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral platform. Speakers at the workshop repeatedly commented on the increased academic attention to CFS, which has apparently become an important case study in the global governance scene. The discussions of the workshop are planned to be fodder for a policy brief emerging from IDDRI (at Sciences Po, in Paris) soon. Participants were largely poli sci researchers, with a splash of civil society, NGOs, and international civil servants; no government staff were there. Few of the attendees thought like economists.
One of the central questions was whether the CFS model would be useful more broadly. The prevailing view seemed to be that the model is too context-dependent to be easily replicated in other issue areas. CFS benefits or benefited from close linkages to FAO for follow-up work, the example of the reform effort of FAO, and the political urgency created by high global food prices. But one participant* made the case that global governance is no longer a planned, organized international system. Instead, it is fluid and complex. In this context, the CFS model is a type of negotiated, hybrid entity emblematic of how governance will work going forward.
One session was dedicated to a discussion of science-policy interfaces. There was a lot of appreciation for the HLPE Report/Decision box model. Participants distinguished between the classic, "linear" model of science-policy interaction and new models. Much was made of "co-production of knowledge" between policymakers and researchers, as the stage that follows after HLPE-style "border interfaces."
The workshop also coincides with the CFS's own monitoring process, which has been struggling to reach agreement on an approach for years. The debate focused on what point of the impact pathway should be the locus of monitoring, i.e., should we be oriented toward outcomes? impact? effectiveness? Some voices agitated strongly that the only thing that matters are development outcomes. Others contended that we had to differentiate between where CFS could be accountable and where it was "co-responsible" with others--national governments, civil society, NGOs, international agencies, private sector firms. As far as I could tell, no minds were changed. Nonetheless, in a final session among researchers, there was some sense that a formula of "differentiated responsibilities" among actors could help resolve some of the political disputes over the monitoring framework.
I learned a lot about institutional specifics and what the CFS means to global governance speakers. My own comments were about the centrality of members'/participants' attention as the key resource for a deliberative body like CFS. Unlike financial resources, attention has network externalities and therefore a different kind of political economy. Instead of misallocation, the risk is "unraveling," where members' conclusions that--for whatever reason--CFS is no longer a useful forum become self-fulfilling prophecies. Not too much response at the event itself but it may lead to a collaboration.
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* The workshop was under Chatham House Rules
