Third meeting of the Stakeholder Forum - Exploring mechanisms for stakeholder engagement

The third edition of the Forum that took place in Parma, 17-18 October 2019 provided a platform for networking and building relations between EFSA and the registered stakeholders. Participants appreciated this year’s Forum set-up with its onboarding session, plenary sessions, as well as the world café conversations that fostered a collaborative dialogue and provided an opportunity for a balanced input.

Members of the Stakeholder Bureau took prominent roles in chairing workshops on topics such as framing of questions, digital solutions for engagement, risk communication, crowdsourcing, and how to ensure a concrete follow-up and feedback on the input provided by stakeholders.

In his closing remarks Bernhard Url, the Executive Director of EFSA recalled that engagement should be a balanced, topic-based, and two-way process. He confirmed EFSA’s commitment to further fine-tune the engagement approach and to provide a regular feedback with a science-based justification for all its actions.

The outcome of the Forum discussions provided a reach food for thoughts on how to proceed with stakeholder engagement and will feed into the review of EFSA’s engagement mechanisms (SEA) and framing of the Strategy 2027.