The Platform Annual General Assembly under the theme “Rethinking Rural Development - Opportunities for new partnerships and territorial approaches in a changing rural environment”, was held on 22-23 January 2014 in Paris and was hosted by The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France and the French Agency for Development (AFD).

 

Robin Bourgeois, Senior Foresight and Development Policies Expert at GFAR presented findings of the Platform-commissioned “Prospects for agriculture and rural development aid in the post-2015 framework “ study - which is not a new foresight exercise persé, but builds on existing work with a look at the next coming 20 years. Responding to the questions of the Platform members the researcher accentuated that one should not go too fast and not necessarily through all the stages towards collective action, shown in the study. No one could build coalitions from a scratch. We were looking at a process that demanded from those working in ARD to fight for things to happen.

Robin also spoke about the need for coming up with more comprehensive goals. “The problem with the MDGs is that they belong to a different world than the one we are living in,” he said. Currently, in practice each MDG was considered in separation, combined with institutional differentiation in terms of responsibility for each of them. Robin suggested, that in the future it could therefore be more fruitful to apply a complex systems approach to see how the goals were interconnected, which of them were the entry points and which were the more long-term ones.