Nowadays, compelling issues such as climate change and food security require primarily multidisciplinary approaches and multistakeholder action in the process of social learning for adaptive livelihoods. This implies an increasing demand for information, knowledge and participation that puts the need for planned communication activities at the centre of development initiatives.
Within this framework, it is essential to support rural knowledge institutions and national programmes for climate change and food security in their capacity to deal with these complex issues. The use of participatory communication approaches can significantly help to enhance rural communities’ resilience to external factors such as natural disasters and climate variability, while improving their livelihood options. Such processes imply bringing people and institutions together to plan for the future, which in turn calls for continued dialogue among peers, knowledge exchange and horizontal communication to foster collaborative change through appropriate Communication for Development (ComDev) approaches and strategies.
This document has been prepared within the context of the Communication for Sustainable Development Initiative (CSDI), an FAO programme supported by the Italian Ministry for the Environment and Territory, that intends to strengthen institutions’ and people’s capacity in the use of communication methods and tools to meet today’s development challenges. The CSDI programme is engaged in documenting and testing experiences in the use of ComDev for climate change adaptation and food security, focusing on strategies and services presently being supported at the field level in pilot areas in Bangladesh, Bolivia, DR Congo, and the Caribbean.