Methodology 

Method behind the Peoples’ Monitoring Project

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In doing so, it provides feedback on implementation processes and implementation problems. Monitoring also tracks resource acquisition, allocation and expenditures and the production of delivery of services. Thus monitoring mechanisms help a country to abide by guidelines and principles to which they have agreed, and monitoring initiatives should empower social movements and grassroots organizations at national and subnational level, and allow their voices to complement other sources of data.

Civil society groups consistently put forward the normative framework to monitoring and accountability exercises for international policies and instruments, which should be a) be human rights based; b) cover the national, regional and international levels; c) require the establishment of relevant structural, process and outcome indicators and benchmarks; d) take into account qualitative as well as quantitative information; e) be inclusive and participatory; and f) be linked to human rights reporting mechanisms.

Recently, there has been an emergence of increasing emphasis on data indicators to monitor development progress, especially with the new 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which calls for a ‘data revolution’. This is providing a very strong impulse to technocratic approaches to monitoring and the development and delivery of new indicators and related datasets, rather than to designing processes that are centered on people and communities and the profound knowledge they have with respect to their conditions of marginalization and abuse and on how to counter them. The data revolution is indeed risking to become the most significant counter-attack to decades of emphasis on participatory development.

This move requires two interconnected sets of responses. On one hand, it is essential to highlight that, while data is important, it is not the only pathway to knowledge and does not mean much without full contextualization and interpretation. Data without a full and meaningful participatory process centered on the direct engagement of those most affected by the development challenges in question cannot translate into real knowledge. On the other hand, peoples’ participation needs to be supported by a different set of indicators than conventional approaches offer.  In contrast to common applications of evaluation and assessment, the framework and information used for monitoring in this project will be supported and driven by the people and communities who are most affected by violations and abuses of RTFN and those who work most closely with these groups.  

Framing and objectives

People working in social movements and grassroots organizations have a different perspective about the achievement of RTFN and food sovereignty than the visions and strategies pushed on them from international level, in particular within international institutions and development agencies. These voices and perspectives are vital to capture, in order to understand the real barriers and pathways to achieving RTFN and food sovereignty; but they have not yet been captured and disseminated adequately.This failure has allowed the dominance in international discourse and forums of self-reinforcing narratives, which sometimes work against the interests of peoples’ organizations.

From this context, monitoring or evaluation exercises by governmental, international or philanthropic organizations can be disempowering to peoples’ organizations because it may reinforce a dominant narrative that does not include the voices of those who are socially, politically or economically marginalized. Monitoring by and with peoples’ organizations can be an empowering initiative, supporting them to realize their human rights, achieve their goals and hold government intuitions accountable for their duty to protect, respect and fulfill human rights legal obligations.

The objective of this project is to develop a supporting set of data that can enable peoples’ direct participation and serve a monitoring process centered on people rather than data. In doing so, this process intends to create a framework to enable social movements and grassroots organizations working in the context of human rights to monitor progress toward food sovereignty and the RTFN at the national and community levels. This will be done by utilizing existing information and datasets, and providing a framework in which rights- based analysis and supplementary community information can be generated and presented within the gaps in current approaches. We also seek to:

1. Provide tools and analytical guidance for social movements, grassroots organizations, and NGOs to utilize existing information to create accountability at national level and coherence in human rights obligations and instruments in Rome (CFS) and Geneva (Human Rights Treaty bodies)
2. Produce, analyze, disseminate and communicate information so that it is useful for civil society advocacy, action planning and accountability.
3. Provide an alternative peoples-based narrative about progress toward food systems that align with food sovereignty and the RTFN to complement other monitoring or assessment of people and the relationship with food systems.

Analytical approach

While the project now is primarily focused on providing proxy indicators for political issues of social movements working on RTFN and food sovereignty, eventually the aim is to expand to providing insight on qualitative information; the use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data that focuses on people’s experiences in a particular context will help better humanize and concretize the monitoring of states at national level. This project eschews a technocratic approach, in which people with statistical or evaluation expertise are looked to as “experts”.We see expertise in the people who are struggling for food sovereignty and fighting violations and abuses of their RTFN.In order to reflect human rights analysis conducted by CSOs, the pages will contain links to parallel reports from CSOs and other key information pages, case data and ongoing case work,and other relevant local and national data and analysis by CSOs, including the members of the GNRTFN.

The information on each country page will seek to compliment and support other monitoring efforts such as the RTFN indicators developed in the IBSA project based at University of Mannheim, which supports monitoring in the human rights bodies of the UN, or the CFS monitoring ToR and related national, regional and global monitoring events.

The project will utilize publicly available information where possible to take advantage of resources and time that have gone into gathering the data and information, in particular where the data has strong analytical and methodological important.Data has limitations, and often is held by specific institutions and developed for a particular purpose- and thus it is important to look into these aspects of the data that is chosen, and to also create guidance for better interpreting those data, as no indicator or measurement exists in a vacuum from other social, political or economic factors.

While developing the indicators and compiling information, it is critical to seek factors that are critical to the achievement of food sovereignty, in the opinions of those who are advocating for it.This is not the same as the principles of food sovereignty; this project aims to assess whether the pre-conditions for those principles exist in a given country or community. While the intention is to develop further information sets, the information is currently group under these political areas:

• Outcomes for RTFN
• Status of international legal obligations
• Political participation for RTFN
• Non-discrimination / Support for at-risk populations
• Peoples’ sovereignty over natural resources
• Right to decent work

These areas were chosen as a reflection of the priorities emerging from the movements and organizations that are part of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition, and the key issues that are constantly being challenged at all policy levels- from the local to global. They are also areas that have key implementation for understanding and operationalizing the multiple dimensions of RTFN and promote an approach and understanding of the root causes of food and nutrition insecurity. In each of these areas, seek structural, process and outcome indicators to understand the potential and existing framework for food sovereignty and RTFN.

Each page will also include Tools for monitoring and capacity/building (training in use of outputs of this project, how to create support for greater community involvement, how to solicit other issues relevant to achieving food sovereignty and the RTFN; other tools and methods for monitoring that FIAN and partners have developed guides for monitoring, including on RTFN, the Tenure Guidelines, ETOs, Global Strategic Framework, and the new CFS Monitoring Mechanism.

Metadata on specific indicators will be developed for each indicator using the following framework:

• Why chosen (how this complements other data in this project)
• Source of data
• How and how often data are collected
• Extent of disaggregation
• Limitations (e.g., gaps, points at which methods of data collection changed)
• Other comments

It is important that is clear where the data comes from as well as some guidance on how it can be utilized and interpreted. Developing the metadata sheets are also an important part of the process as they open space to bring in experts on the respective topic or sector to bring in their expertise and also critically reflect on monitoring and data collection are currently being used in that particular sector. As with any participatory process that involves many different stages, persons and consultations, developing the metadata sheets takes time. Thus far we have completed the metadata for indicators on Stunting, Legal Recognition of RTFN, Political Participation and National Food Security Policy.

Roles, and those involved in the project

As there are still have many open questions and dilemmas in how to generate information and measure change in some areas. In order to resolve some of these issues it is important on one hand to rely on “experts”, or those experienced in monitoring and human rights analysis, but it is equally, if not more important to ensure that there is a constant dialogue and information exchange between movements and the FIAN IS (responsible for information collection). In terms of expert guidance, in May 2016, FIAN held a workshop with the technical advisory group of the project – Maarten Immink,(i) Molly Anderson,(ii) Anne Bellows (iii) and Stefano Prato (iv) – with the SDC team, and specialized FIAN IS staff members to finalize the indicators, and presentation method for the information collected.

The technical responsibility of the collection and presentation of the data will rest with FIAN International; other CSOs, including the members of the GNRTFN will support this collection within their capacity, and in particular by reporting on their own related activities and evaluations, supporting their work at the national and regional level(s).

Additionally, the support of monitoring experts and trusted civil society support actors have been enlisted to support some of the technical work of the project. Many of these experts have been consulted in the creation of the indicators, advising on how to transform political priorities and issues into more concise, and providing input on reliable sources of data and information.

Footnotes:

• (i) Maarten Immink is currently an independent consultant; he served as the former coordinator of the Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information Mapping Systems (FIVIMS) Secretariat at FAO, and previously served as an Editorial Board member for the RTFN Watch
• (ii) Molly Anderson is a professor of Food Studies at  Middlebury College, focusing on hunger and food security, fixing food systems, sustainability and system dynamics. She is involved in food system planning at the state and regional scales, and participates in the national Inter-Institutional Network for Food, Agriculture & Sustainability and the regional Food Solutions New England network. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and was a Coordinating Lead Author on the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science & Technology for Development. 
• (iii) Anne C. Bellows is a professor of Gender and Nutrition in the Institute of for Social Sciences University of Syracuse, as well as an Editorial Board member of the RTFN Watch, and a board member of FIAN International. She engages at the intersection of academic and civil society interests, with particular focus on human rights and food and nutrition sovereignty/security.
• (iv) Stefano Prato is the Managing Director of the Society for International Development (SID) and Editor of SID’s Quarterly Journal “Development”. He is an active member of the Addis Ababa CSO Coordinating Group of the CSO Financing for Development Platform, the Africa Working Group on Post 2015, the Liaison Group of the CSO Platform on Nutrition and the Editorial Board of the RTFN Watch, among others.