HDSFS Coalition Transforming Food Systems Workshop Management of Conflicts of Interests in Public-Private Partnerships

Background

The UN Food Systems Summit brought together governments, civil society, champions, businesses, young people, international agencies, farmers, consumer advocates and many other actors of food systems transformation. All these stakeholders have a role to play in ensuring that healthy diets from sustainable food systems become a reality for all. 

Public-private partnerships are a key tool to join forces across sectors and bring stakeholders together to create the momentum needed to deliver and can be drivers for innovation and to overcome barriers that one organization cannot solve alone. However, when multiple stakeholders work together, conflicts of interest are often unavoidable due to the different incentives and priorities of stakeholders. For this reason, it is important to establish safeguarding elements to ensure policy measures to promote healthy diets from sustainable food systems maintain their credibility while at the same time remaining an inclusive multistakeholder process that has good chances of implementation.

This peer-to-peer learning forum will bring together Members of the Coalition of Action on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems (HDSFS) including Member States, UN agencies, CSO, social movements, academia and interested entities to explore and discuss how to prevent and manage the inherent conflicts of interests in public-private partnerships. It aims to inspire HDSFS Member States to deal with conflicts of interests in their own setting. 

The Peer-to-Peer Learning forum will contribute to the goal of the HDSFS coalition to facilitate Peer-to-peer learning by providing best practice examples and challenges that are relevant and applicable for countries across the globe.  

Objectives

• To share examples of how public-private partnerships can be a useful tool to deliver healthy diets from sustainable food systems;  
• To provide an overview of the most common reasons for conflict of interest and which pitfalls to avoid when engaging in a public-private partnership; 
• To learn from HDSFS Members the challenges they are facing in public-private partnerships and how to mitigate 

Outcome: The outcome of this workshop will include a summary of discussions as well as a repository of relevant resources and references.

Tentative agenda

Organizer

Denmark and the HDSFS Coalition.