Common characteristics of successful CAP/RISA teams

Individual regional CAP/RISA teams always begin by building and reaffirming the essential foundation of trusted relationships. Through sustained opportunities for engagement of researchers and societal partners from all relevant sectors, they learn about the needs of decision-makers, jointly identify research needs, conduct collaborative research, advise and assist, inform and support partners through complex decision challenges and in the process build partners’ capacity to take the necessary actions to adapt to weather extremes and climate change. CAP/RISA teams are partners in solution-finding.

In cases where partners already have identified potential solutions, CAP/RISA teams often are supportive of the advancement of policy and management solutions (e.g., by convening forums for dialog, through public education, training of specific users, or connecting stakeholders with each other). In other instances, CAP/RISA teams are responsive to the stakeholder needs. They may elicit or help stakeholders identify their goals/resource needs and then work to meet those needs with specific, requested outputs (e.g., to fill data gaps, develop new knowledge, or provide training). In other instances, CAP/RISA teams may open the decision space to innovative ideas and approaches (e.g., identifying new policy options, implementation strategies, creating new data/models/analysis /insights, synthesizing information in new ways that spawn new/different conversations). And finally, CAP/RISA teams may play an essential, constructively-critical role with regional decision-makers. They may inform and advance policy and management debates by being that credible, outside voice on existing/planned, but inadequate or missing approaches to dealing with current challenges (e.g., by providing commentary, evaluating implementation and outcomes).

In all these ways, CAP/RISA teams build the adaptive capacity of decision-makers, (e.g., by helping them learn more quickly, often together with partners they may not have met otherwise, increasing their flexibility, changing their attitudes and ways of thinking about problems, increasing decision-makers’ access to assets and their sense of agency). Greater adaptive capacity ultimately enables decision-makers to take necessary actions such as changing behaviors, modifying their practices, policies, plans, guidance, rules, regulations, standards, and budget allocations on the basis of better information. It is these kinds of actions that over time change communities’, households’, and entire sectors’ risks, vulnerabilities and likelihood of suffering the impacts of climate change.