09 Jul Global Governance: What lessons from the CFS and its reform?

Over the last couple of days I was attending a workshop titled:  Global Governance: What lessons from the CFS and its reform? 
CFS: Committee on World Food Security
CSO: Civil Society Organization
CSM: Civil Society Mechanism 
The workshop, which targeted researchers, was hosted by CIHEAM, IDDRI, CIRAD and INRA and held at the IAMM Campus in Montpellier. It is expected that the meeting organizers will develop an output document of sorts so I won’t discuss the outcomes of the workshop but I will share the presentation that I gave. Click here: CSO Impact on the CFS
I received interesting feedback. Many were surprised that I was not more critical of the CFS and CSM process. Indeed, I have criticisms and concerns but my academic interest in the CFS is focused more on process and interactions between CSOs and the rest of the CFS than on the internal dynamics of the CSM. I believe that the CSM needs to be accountable to itself and to the CFS but that I am not the appropriate person to critique the CSM.
Second, people commented on the value of contextualizing the inclusion of CSOs as participants in the CFS. There are assumptions made that the inclusion of CSOs as participants in the CFS came out of the crisis and that such a process can be scaled out to other multinational contexts. I make the case that because of a long history of CSO engagement in the CFS the space had been created to facilitate negotiations for their participation and that this history needs to be taken into account when thinking of replicating the mechanism.
I also talked about a cycle of awareness and enthusiasm related to the CFS that is enhanced through CSO engagement. This sparked some interest, or at least recognition in the meeting. The idea is simply that through their engagement CSOs create awareness (e.g. through network and media communication), they experienced initial success which served to increased enthusiasm. In turn, this increased awareness both at the civil society level and at the political level. What I mean by the latter is that through engagement in debate, civil society challenge governments who in turn had the need to prepare more effectively for the negotiations. Part of this preparation included greater communication with technical staff in the capitals. This has the effect of increasing awareness about the CFS.
Similarly, we can develop a  cycle for academic enthusiasm and awareness. This was alluded to although not discussed explicitly.
Related to this, there were calls from speakers coming from within the UN system to move beyond the focus on the CFS process as a governance exercise/experiment and to reflecting instead on the impact of these governance processes. The call is a valid one but one that fell a bit on the deaf ears of the political scientists and sociologists whose interest and expertise is indeed governance processes!