Facilitating Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships to Foster Sustainable and Inclusive Food Systems 2021

Are you in the challenging position to design, facilitate or participate in complex change partnerships, involving diverse stakeholders? Are you wondering how best to deal with power dynamics and conflicts? How to create social learning processes and enable effective communication between the different actors? The Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (MSP) course helps you in taking up this challenge! The course is highly interactive and builds on the participants’ own experiences and cases. Participatory methodologies and tools, group work and role-plays, as well as fieldwork to explore a real-life Multi-Stakeholder Partnership, will help you learn how to design, plan and facilitate a Multi-Stakeholder Partnership.

What will you learn?

Upon completion of the course you will:

• Understand the concepts and rationale of multi-stakeholder partnerships, complexity and institutional change;
• Analyse different types of multi-stakeholder partnerships in terms of the issues at stake, the stakeholders, their interests, (power) relations, conflicts, external context, etc.;
• Discover how to design and plan an extended Multi-Stakeholder Partnership (MSP);
• To practice and learn how to use a broad range of participatory methodologies and tools in MSPs;
• Be challenged on your own facilitation and communication skills

Course programme in more detail

Today’s world is faced by many complex issues: the over-use of natural resources, climate change, continuing poverty and inequality. Quite simply, these complex problems require innovative solutions that call for new ways of working together across the boundaries of business, government and civil society.

However, good processes don't just happen, they need to be designed and facilitated. Specifically, they need to be designed and facilitated on the basis of a sound rationale for change based on a good understanding of the context, with a clear purpose and vision in mind, and based on principles for transformative change.

This obviously implies some quite specific facilitation capacities and skills - from the capacity to engage with the complex political context underpinning the rationale for the MSP, to the capacity to work with individuals and groups in a way that enables them to challenge themselves and each other in the quest for new approaches and collaborative learning. The course covers state-of-the-art thinking about designing and facilitating multi-stakeholder partnerships and institutional change.

How to register:

For who is this course?

We welcome participants who are involved, or will be involved in future, in the design or facilitation of multi-stakeholder partnerships, or participate in one. You may work for an NGO, government, private sector organisation, research facility, university or consultancy. Proficiency in English is required.

To register, please visit the following link.

The Application Procedure

1. Register for the course of your interest by clicking the ‘apply’ button on the webpage of this course. A registration form will open;
2. Fill in the required fields of the registration form. Please note to write your date of birth without a zero (e.g. 1-5-1980 instead of 01-05-1980);
3. Before you submit, check your details on the final page of the registration form;
4. After submitting, you will receive a confirmation email. Make sure to directly click on the link in the email to confirm your registration. Without your confirmation, your registration cannot be processed;
5. If you apply as an OKP or MSP-scholarship candidate, you will receive a registration letter for the scholarship at the beginning of the scholarship cycle.
6. If you apply as a self-funded participant: we will forward your request for acceptance to the course leader. This can take some time as it depends on the coordinators' schedule (1-3 weeks);
7. If you’re accepted into the course programme, we’ll send you an admission letter by e-mail;
8. You receive all required travel documents from us after you are selected for the scholarship (OKP/MSP-scholarship candidates) or when we’ve received your payment (self-funded participant).

Technology Requirements Online Learning

Minimum technical and software requirements for online learning courses are:

• Stable internet connection: required to access the online learning platform and assignments (at least 3G mobile network).
• Hardware requirement: acces to a laptop, smartphone, tablet or a personal computer with webcam and microphone.