Multi-stakeholder Consultation, Lobby & Advocacy, Networking
Stakeholders are increasingly consulted nationally and locally as part of the planning process of many public sector initiatives, local area development plans and by national and international NGOs. Some types of consultation processes have been implemented for several years with varying degrees of success such as Poverty Reduction Strategy Processes, other processes may be entirely new. A consultation process does not in itself ensure a proper dialogue and de facto translates into effective voice and real influence for concerned stakeholders. It may at times even be experienced as a top down exercise by participating groups.
Consultation processes may be targeted towards specific interests and priorities of groups, including rights based issues which are more politically sensitive and often addressed through lobby and advocacy campaigns. This raises questions of how advocacy and lobby organizations best become able to influence specific policy processes with stakeholder input and how to translate lobby and advocacy interventions into concrete results. How best to deliver effective responses as a network is often complex and requires carefully laid-out strategies to pay off.
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During multi-stakeholder consultations and advocacy initiatives, it is essential to find ways to bring everybody to the negotiating table to ensure they feel they get a voice and that they get heard. |
We offer support in the design and implementation of multi-stakeholder processes to influence policy making and to provide stakeholders with more leverage, making use of available windows of opportunity. We also assist organisations in the development of concrete and practical networking strategies for lobby and advocacy organisations and how translate these into effective networking performance, as well as how to monitor progress over time using participatory assessment methodologies.
Examples of assignments
- Review of effectiveness of national Gender Network in Bangladesh in changing existing gender related discrimination through influencing government policy making at national, regional and local level and through right to information campaigns;
- Developing new global governance structure for International Confederation of Midwives for their international network and developing strategy process to ensure that lobby and networking deliver concrete measurable results at policy levels;
- Policy process design for Ministry of Water, Resources and Irrigation in Egypt to include stakeholders in policy development processes and to influence policy makers within the government;
- Setting up country networks for Dutch Women for Water Partnership in Moldova, Tanzania, Ukraine to support women in gaining more influence over local policy decision making;
- Conducting training seminars on food security and trade issues for national policy officers to integrate rights language into trade agreements in Bolivia, Kenya and Brazil;
- Mid Term Review of Agri-ProFocus Partnership network of twenty-two civil, public and private development organisations supporting rural producer organisations in the South;
- Development of chapter on M&E of public-private dialogue processes for a World Bank published handbook, including practical guidelines to measure progress of Public-Private-Partnerships;
- Research on consultation processes with private sector on PRSP and pro-poor economic growth strategies in Tanzania.
See our MDF Experiences to read more on the assignments
