Enabling synthesis : lessons from the first three years of CARIAA

Abstract

Global challenges such as climate change requires attention to multiple scales of knowledge production and intervention points that involve researchers, practitioners and local partners. The Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA) connects more than 450 researchers and practitioners from over 40 organization in 17 countries to build the resilience of vulnerable populations in climate change hotspots. As a result, the creation of spaces, processes, and opportunities to enable collaboration and synthesis on a scale as large as CARIAA, can only be done through flexible program design as well as learning through ‘experimentation’ with research models and partnership arrangements. This brief provides an overview of CARIAA’s lessons on transdisciplinary collaboration at the midpoint of the program. We identify collaborative spaces— referred to as “seeds for collaboration”, present challenges of creating conditions to collaborate under a consortia model, and highlight the role of programmatic leadership in identifying opportunities for synthesis and meaningfully nurturing synthesis activities.