Bridging the gap? Facilitation in the Civil Society Mechanism for Relations to the UN Committee on World Food Security

This is a discussion paper on facilitation prepared for the Civil Society Mechanism for Relations to the UN Committee on World Food Security (hereafter CSM). The purpose of this document is not to provide an assessment of facilitation (see below and the section ‘Recommendations’ for some thoughts on this), but rather to help support internal reflection on the practice of facilitation in the CSM. This is in a context where a) there is something of a knowledge gap in the CSM regarding what facilitation is and how effective it is, and b) collective, systematic reflection on the role and contribution of facilitation to securing the participation of affected constituencies is largely absent. Drawing from data provided via interviews with CSM facilitators and observations of CSM facilitation practice (see Appendix 2. Methodology), it is hoped that this paper might support efforts to address both of those gaps by providing an initial overview of facilitation practice in the CSM (Section 2, pp. 2-8), identifying some potential facilitation challenges (Section 3, pp. 8 - 13), and offering some provisional recommendations for discussion (Section 4, pp. 13-14).