Summary report and recordings of Policy Coherence Workshop are now available

The full-day workshop targeted an audience comprising policymakers, HDHL and FACCE-JPI’s MB (Management Board) and GB (Governing Board) members, respectively, along with researchers focusing on policies in food production, processing, nutrition, health, and climate change. They explored the challenge of policy coherence in the transition towards a more sustainable and healthy food system in Europe. Therefore, the workshop addressed the fundamental question:

The workshop aimed to contribute to understanding the evolving role of science-based policy advice, along with the dynamics of science-policy and science-society interfaces in organizing such advice. It also aimed to understand the role of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research in science advice and how it can contribute to the governance of science-policy interfaces. Based on these goals, it sought to identify actions with the potential to improve the capacity of both FACCE-JPI and HDHL to contribute to policy coherence.

To address the aims and achieve the expected outcomes, the workshop featured an excellent lineup of guest speakers.

• Giuseppina Luvarà, Policy Officer, Unit B2 – Bioeconomy and Food Systems, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, DG RTD, provided context about FOOD2030 and policy coherence in the EU context, setting the scene for the following speakers.
• José Valls Bedeau, Policy officer, Food Systems and Food Safety Division, FAO, discussed enabling policy coherence for agrifood systems sransformation.
• Rebecca Fernandez, Director, Food Safety, Research & Innovation at FoodDrinkEurope, chair at FACCE-JPI’s Stakeholder Advisory Board and HDHL’s Stakeholder Advisory Board, shared insights into the challenge of policy coherence for the Food and Drink Industry.
• Dr. Florian Kern, Institute of Ecological Economy Research, Berlin (IÖW), assessed transforming Europe’s food system by evaluating the EU policy mix.
• Dr. Jacqueline Broerse, Athena Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Project Coordinator of FIT4FOOD2030, discussed an approach to research that adopts a systemic perspective—the Living Lab approach.
• Louis-Georges Soler, INRAE, France, provided an economist's perspective on policy coherence for the sustainable food systems transition in Europe, based on his recent paper "The European Green Deal Improves the Sustainability of Food Systems but Has Uneven Economic Impacts on Consumers and Farmers" (Guyomard et al., 2023).

The summary report, written by Cristobal Marin Rojas from the FACCE-JPI Secretariat, provides an in-depth overview of the contributions of the guest speakers and of the interactive activity that followed, in which participants were split into groups and encouraged to collaboratively reflect on what attracts or repels policymakers, identify incentives and barriers they face, draw lessons from case studies, determine metrics for measuring success, and think about how can FACCE-JPI and HDHL facilitate achieving coherence in the intersection between science and research.

The full report is available here.

The video recordings of the guest speakers are available here.