Closing the Living Income Gap at Scale: What policy experience can teach us
What are necessary components for creating effective, harmonised, and coherent policy initiatives that promote a living income?
Closing the living income gap at scale increasingly depends on coordinated national and regional policy strategies. Yet practical, experience-based insights on how these strategies are built, what motivates the actors who shape them, and what practitioners can do to influence them remain scarce.
The forthcoming Components for creating living income policy initiatives report, jointly commissioned by Evidensia, LICOP and ISEAL, begins to fill that gap.
Drawing on three in-depth policy case studies and two deep dives, the report examines how living income policy initiatives have evolved in practice, what motivated key actors to support or resist them, and what lessons practitioners can draw from these experiences. It also presents a framework for creating comparable case studies focused on the political economy of living income-related policy.
Join us for this launch webinar where the report’s authors will present their findings and discuss how the lessons can be applied in your own context.
A series of online workshops will follow in the autumn focused on individual case studies. We invite attendees to also join us for these to dig into the cases in more depth, stress-test the lessons, and think through what they mean for your own work. Sign up to the LICOP and Evidensia newsletters to be the first to hear when workshop dates are announced.
Speakers:
- Stephanie Daniels, Senior Program Director, Sustainable Food Lab
Stephanie manages Food Lab impact and learning partnerships focused on living income and sustainable livelihoods of farmers in global value chains. She is a co-founder of the Living Income Community of Practice, facilitates the Alliance for Living Income in Cocoa, and co-facilitates the ICO technical workstream on living-prosperous income. She has been the Food Lab industry liaison for initiatives such as the USAID Climate Smart Agriculture Learning Community, Business Action to Reduce Post Harvest Loss and the Gates Foundation funded New Business Models for Sustainable Trade.
- Joost Backer, Lead project researcher
Joost brings over seven years of experience in sustainable agricultural supply chains across 15+ sectors, working with national governments, multinational corporations, NGOs, and foundations. His expertise spans policy design, multi-stakeholder coordination, and systems and trends analysis. Joost is based in Amsterdam and currently works on a guidebook for transition professionals in international trade, sustainability, and development. He has previously worked for NewForesight – the sustainability consultancy for systems change. Feel free to contact him at joostbacker(at)hotmail.com
Project researchers:
- Anna Laven
Anna is a social scientist and senior cocoa value chain expert with 20+ years in the sector as a researcher and adviser. She has deep knowledge on major sustainability topics, including living income, gender equality, farming household segmentation, and price mechanisms.
- Christopher Wunderlich
Christopher has over 30 years of experience in international development and sustainable commodity trade, with a particular focus on sustainable agriculture and the coffee sector.
- Friedel Heutz-Adams
Friedel Heutz-Adams has been a researcher at Suedwind-Institute since 1993. His research interests are in cocoa, coffee, palm oil, automotive and technology value chains. He is a well-respected expert in the sustainable cocoa field, having co-authored several Cocoa Barometers and an active participant in the VOICE network. In this report, he co-authored the LID case study with Anna Laven.
With thanks also to Abdulahi Ayuli, Global Program Director, cocoa and coffee at Rikolto International for his contribution detailing Rikolto’s experience with policy, facilitation, and system change.