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The goal of this exercise is to identify some of the tools a development agent needs for achieving effective local participation in policy development. The intended audiences are FAO professionals and their colleagues, in other agencies and in the field programs. This paper uses an analogy of walking and climbing to separate the familiar project experiences (the walking) from the less-known territory of policy influence (the climbing). This exercise is unusual in that it looks back at a number of field experiences that were not formulated with a focus on local participation in policy development (no one started out with the intention to climb). From a research perspective we attempted to understand processes after the fact rather than following them as they developed, and we leaned on fields such as organizational management that deal with such challenges on a regular basis. The case studies here were written with the aim of learning about the participatory policy development processes that took place around and within the contexts of the FAO projects. The majority of selected cases constitute a series of projects that started with a technical orientation (e.g. food security) and over time began to appreciate the significance of the policy context as an area where the project could play a direct role. All projects contributed by creating new capacities at the individual and organizational levels. They created networking opportunities (spaces) whereby different stakeholders gained a voice. While many of those spaces were temporary, their very existence established both a precedent and a sense of what is possible. However, by not having an explicit “policy influence” agenda, the projects may have missed opportunities to document and report on some of these achievements. In the analogy: the walker may have climbed without knowing he followed good practices because he did not know their name, or their foundation.
