From Food Production to Food Security - Global Environmental ...

awareness of the GEC issues within the policy and other stakeholder communities; (ii) ithelps raise awareness of the policy and resource management issues within the GEC sciencecommunity; and (iii) it identifies, and begins to build, a team of stakeholders keen to workcollaboratively.A powerful way to facilitate stakeholder involvement is through the use of participatoryscenario exercises. These link research activities more closely to actual decision-makingprocesses and have shown considerable potential to provide a mechanism for involving arange of stakeholders and for facilitating communication between them. As discussed inPaper 5, there are three major benefits. First, participants in a scenario development processunderstand better the issues involved via structured dialogue. Second, scenario exercises offera ‘neutral space’ to discuss future challenges as uncertainty about the future has an‘equalizing effect’; no-one can predict the future, thus no-one can be proven ‘wrong’. Thisopportunity for open discussion also helps in engendering mutual respect, understanding andtrust, which is crucial for building effective research teams for follow-up activities. Finally,the discussion of, and reflection on, possible future trends can create the ground to revealconflicts, common views about goals, or different perceptions about today’s challenges.Methodological developments for regional researchWhile the subsections above have identified numerous contributions to the food securityscience agenda, and especially when applied to the regional level, the planning, execution andreporting of such research is far from straight forward. This is due to the number of reasons:First, the stakeholder community at regional level is highly complex, embodying a widerange of different types of actors operating on different scales at different levels. While it isimportant to recognise this complexity, the primary ‘client’ for the research does need to beclarified. This could be a regional or an intergovernmental body (e.g. SADC, EU), but theseare but one of four main categories of stakeholders (research, government, business and civilsociety) who operate on a similar spatial resolution (Paper 5). Determining how and when toengage with them is challenging as cultural and institutional factors affecting science-policyrelationships (e.g. aims, timescale, success measures, evidence, quality control) oftenfrustrate engagement (Scott et al., 2005). Appreciating this is critical and the systematic stepslaid out in Paper 5 (Box 3) help overcome many of these problems. This also helps toestablish innovative science plans through co-design. Paper 5 also discusses when to engagestakeholders and provides insights in organizing and understanding the complexity ofstakeholder engagement, contributing to the concepts and practice of this area.Second, while the unit of analysis is defined as the region, research could require identifyinga number of case study sites so as to establish, for instance, the heterogeneity of a givenvariable across the region. Choosing case study sites can be politically and well asscientifically complex, so clear criteria are needed. Contributions to best practise includechoosing sites that lie along gradients of, for example, anticipated temperature andprecipitation change or current and anticipated grazing pressure. The sites should also112