Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Asks for Guidance on Social Responsibility in Fisheries and Aquaculture Value Chain

In recent years, social responsibility has become a major concern in the fisheries sector due to incidents of labor rights violations and human rights abuses throughout the fisheries value chain. As a result, numerous international and national initiatives are calling for increased social responsibility and improvements in social and labor conditions in the sector.

In 2018, during its 33rd Session, the Committee on Fisheries recommended developing social sustainability guidelines in cooperation with relevant stakeholders, including the industry and fish worker associations. During this session, the complexity and importance of collaboration among organizations and stakeholders in addressing social issues were discussed and highlighted as a way to assist actors along the fish value chains, including small-scale fisheries.

Problem

In 2019, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations conducted four in-person “Dialogues” worldwide – in Agadir, Brussels, Rome, and Shanghai – in order to receive feedback from relevant stakeholders in the fisheries and aquaculture sector. The Dialogues included participants representing trade unions, governments, NGOs, academia, civil society, industry, and international organizations.

Although this was a strong start to the global conversation, the FAO needed a way to broaden their reach and give a voice to stakeholders that were unable to travel to one of the four events.

Solution

Using Konveio, the FAO hosted an online public consultation around their draft guidelines, which was available on the FAO GLOBEFISH website for about six weeks.

• To know who was participating and who the participants represented, FAO used Konveio to require stakeholders to create user profiles before commenting.
• Users left their comments directly on the document, reducing the time that FAO staff needed to track and process comments.
• Konveio’s simple user interface allowed stakeholders with limited computer skills to leave comments online.
• The FAO used Konveio’s PDF export feature to share results with the team, making organizing, formatting and tracking comments easy and fast.

Watch Demo

Impact

Konveio helped streamline the commenting process and analysis while simplifying participation for stakeholders from around the world and reducing the challenges related to collecting, copying, and formatting public comments. More than 750 comments were collected online during the online engagement period. Comments collected using the Konveio platform, e-mails and in-person dialogues were then revised and analyzed to be included in the FAO draft guidance, which will be released later in 2019.

Contact us to learn more

‍