Practitioner guide for innovative markets

In 2017, the partnership coordinated 5 working groups through two rounds of collective writing and culminated in a workshop held in New Delhi, India in November 2017. We are most proud of the scenarios that we developed to help innovators to think through how they can make changes in their local food systems - these scenarios will form the basis of how this guide can be operationalized and integrated into public, private and civil society initiatives for food system change. There were a number of challenges related to the air pollution in Delhi during our workshop (which made discussing changes towards more sustainable systems even more prescient) and there were some challenges in the remote collaboration throughout the year based on dealing with working across time zones. Nonetheless, all of the participants stayed engaged throughout the process, but this did take significant support and follow-up from the core FAO/INRA team. Our advice for others in the 10YFP network would be that while participatory activities are very demanding in terms of time, money and ability to work across cultures and time zones - the results are far richer than you can imagine. It is important to stay with the project and see it to its end. In 2018, the guide was tested with local multi-actor platforms: New Delhi, India in March and Thies, Senegal in July. The peer review process and revisions are underway and we plan on publishing the guide in 2019.