DiverIMPACTS stakeholder platform meeting

The stakeholder platform of DiverIMPACTS consists of twelve independent external experts. The members come from different sectors along the value chain, different countries and different disciplines, e.g. farming, policy making (EU and regional), supporting industries (breeding, machinery, etc.), education (academic and advisory), processing and retail, consumers, etc.

All participants of this platform are contributing to reviewing and reflecting on results, recommendations and long-term strategies of the project. The direct and continuous assessment of project outcomes with end-user experts enables the project partners to produce useful and practically applicable results and recommendations. It also helps the DiverIMPACTS project to formulate specific long-term strategies to increase the adoption of crop diversification along the entire value chain.

The experts in the stakeholder platform provide feedback on planned work and first results during the first three years of the project and will focus their evaluation of final project results during years four and five. Further, this network has an external role in promoting the project results and advocate the subject in their specific sectors.
The members of the stakeholder platform met for the second time on September 16 and 17, 2019 in Budapest, ahead of the European Conference on Crop Diversification. During the meeting, we discussed the outcomes, publications and deliverables produced in the first two years as well as feedback received from the European Commission during the project review meeting in Brussels in February 2019. Further, it was discussed how the project can make the most use of the different expertise among the 12 members of the stakeholder platform. The group decided that they would like to organise a series of theme-focussed online workshops to interact over the coming year. Examples for suggested focus areas might be the 25 DiverIMPACTS case studies, policy recommendations or decision support tools. The aim is to gain a better insight of the different tasks and work packages of DiverIMPACTS but primarily to identify any areas that would benefit from closer interaction and collaboration with the stakeholder platform. As they all have their own individual areas of expertise and personal interests, this match-making will be enabled through direct interaction with the relevant project partners.