This book assesses the United Nations' success in opening up to civil society organizations which can help defend its founding values in a globalized world in which non-state actors impact strongly on what formerly were purely intergovernmental processes. The global governance of food and agriculture is used to ground the story. Food is a basic need and agriculture provides a livelihood for the majority of the world's population. The food price surges of 2007 triggered off uprisings in cities around the world and a long overdue effort to revisit the global governance of this key sector. These developments have attracted the attention of organizations representing rural social movements of the South, which have been underrepresented in other global forums, sparking off significant innovations in FAO-civil society relations. This case study is set into the context of system-wide research evaluating the degree to which civil society-UN interaction has contributed to: changes in development discourse within the UN system; institutional innovation to accommodate civil society input into global policy debate; building two-way links between global policy dialogue and action at the country level. The author concludes that the UN system has generally failed to move from episodic interaction, primarily with Northern NGOs, to meaningful involvement of civil society actors in global political process. The bases for such involvement are far more solid than they were a decade ago, particularly in terms of the structures and capacities of social organizations directly representing the sectors of the population who are the object of the MDGs. At the same time, the interests behind the neoliberal agenda that these organizations contest are just as present as ever on the global scene. The challenge before the UN is to provide a terrain on which meaningful confrontation and negotiation can take place, starting off from principles and practices proposed in the concluding section.