The European Consultation Workshop was held virtually in SEptember 2022, and brought together participants from 27 European organisations. There were three goals of the workshops, namely to: encourage European organisations to join the ARA, to generate greater support of the Adaptation Research for Impact Principles, and to catalyse new long-term partnerships and collaborative action research on adaptation in vulnerable communities.
Shared insights
Workshop participants shared insights from European organisations engaged in forms of action research relevant to climate change adaptation and resilience. This included funders, research organisations, and implementers. Key learnings and lessons from participants’ experience include the following:
Funders
- Linking research with local policy formulation is challenging.
- Need to synthesise knowledge from different local initiatives into a comprehensive ‘systems view’.
- Difficult to strengthen local knowledge centres in an institutionally weak and corrupt environment.
- Climate impacts and adaptation requirements are very regionally specific, making knowledge-transfer from one context to another challenging • Need realistic expectations from research with three-year funding.
- Collaboration between funders, researchers, practitioners and policy makers delivers new insights and greater integration of adaptation into existing processes.
- Help projects communicate findings better, bridge projects to new funders.
Research organisations
- Need for better communication between organisations on priorities, expectations and issues such as M&E indicators and need for flexibility.
- Should acknowledge that “experts” and “communities” often have divergent priorities.
- Need for language translation is often under-emphasised in technical work on adaptation, but is key to ensuring inclusive and comprehensive processes.
- Existing governance structures struggle to work with complex and interconnected systems that stretch beyond national borders.
- Adapting scientific data into actionable information needs a lot of effort and funding.
- Research organisations should engage from the start with policy-makers to ensure that the tools which are developed are appropriate and usable.
- Important to focus on qualitative issues (e.g. “empathy”) to understand pathways for delivering policy impact
Implementers and conveners
- Need to ensure alignment in donor and host government policies on adaptation.
- To keep key stakeholders engaged requires better dissemination of data-driven results through effective communication and advocacy.
- Important to focus on challenges and barriers preventing the adoption of good practice, alongside collating examples of good practice.
- Crucial to emphasise collaboration, connection and application of knowledge to ensure the researchpractice divide is effectively bridged.
- Community ownership and management of adaptation processes is key.
Related
European Consultation Workshop
This report captures insights from European organisations engaged in action research relevant to climate change adaptation and resilience.