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Evita Rodrigues, Prerna Singh, December 26, 2025
How do we move from individual ideas to collective action? At Transitions Research, this is a question we’ve asked ourselves often. Climate change is a shared problem, but too often the work to adapt remains fragmented. Collaboration can enable us to pool knowledge, experience, and resources so that solutions can travel, adapt, and scale. As the urgency of climate change grows, where challenges cut across sectors, regions, and disciplines, collective action is no longer optional but essential. The Schwab Foundation’s recent Future is Collective report highlights how organizations that don’t work together often arrive at problem-solving with competing agendas and fragmented approaches. Their research shows that real progress depends on creating “connective tissue” between otherwise disconnected actors.
How can we then move from a competitive to a collaborative sphere? That question drove us to design and run the Ideas Collaborative session at the ARA–TLS symposiums earlier this year.
We were responding to a dynamic we see all the time: community groups with grounded ideas but limited resources; researchers with valuable data that isn’t easily accessible; NGOs working on similar issues in parallel without much exchange. Good ideas exist, but they’re often isolated. They sit in meeting notes, remain buried in reports, or appear in siloed grant proposals that go unfunded. The real challenge isn’t simply having ideas, but building the systems that allow people to connect, refine, and act on them together. Research has shown that higher interaction scenarios can have almost an eight-fold increase in odds of collaborating. While traditional conferences and workshops create opportunities to network, they seldom provide the supportive structures or reduced hierarchy to translate these connections into active partnerships. Välikangas & Jarvenpaa (2021) speak of siloing where lack of connectivity and communication lead to the network falling short of its collective capacity to learn and innovate.
That was the starting point for the Ideas Collaborative session that the Climate Adaptation Learning Lab (CALL) designed and facilitated as the Tracking Learning Sharing (TLS) lead for the Adaptation Research Alliance (ARA). The Regional Knowledge Symposiums, held in Peru, Nairobi, and Colombo in February and March 2024, brought together over 80+ participants from across the adaptation research community to exchange knowledge and insights, with the goal of strengthening on-ground adaptation efforts. But in these busy spaces, there’s often little time to slow down and build shared ideas. We saw an opportunity to create that space intentionally.
We approached this with a few key beliefs:
We wanted to avoid the classic problem of good ideas sitting in notebooks at the end of workshops. Instead, our approach focused on peer exchange, collective prioritisation, and making early commitments to lead or support ideas. It stemmed from the idea that learning isn’t just about sharing knowledge—but equally about finding ways to collaborate in order to act on that knowledge.
The process didn’t just produce isolated ideas, it revealed where participants saw real potential for collective work. We learned that participants valued having structured collaboration space, especially the chance to see others vote for, adapt, and champion their ideas.
The Ideas Collaborative was designed in three simple but deliberate stages:
Participants were asked to anonymously write down their boldest ideas for an area of climate adaptation they would be keen to work on, especially imagining if finance wasn’t a constraint. We did this to flatten hierarchies and reduce self-censorship. It meant someone from a small local NGO could propose as freely as someone from a large international agency. It also encouraged people to think beyond their organisational agendas and focus on what truly mattered to them. We saw quieter voices contribute equally, and ideas evolve based on their merit—rather than on who proposed them or how polished they were.
All ideas were then shared in groups and rated by peers, based on their own interest to collaborate. The goal wasn’t to pick “the best idea,” but to surface ideas that resonated widely. This step turned participants into active evaluators and co-owners of the process. It also made visible which ideas felt relevant across diverse contexts and experiences.
Following the rating exercise, participants were invited to mark authorship of their ideas and join open discussions to refine them further. The floor was opened for networking and planning between collaborators. This was an opportunity for us to challenge how learning is usually done—to think of it as relational work that builds capacity for ongoing collective action. It was about supporting people to share what they know, learn from each other, and find practical ways to move forward together.
Too often, workshops end with enthusiasm but little follow-up, participants return to their daily rhythms, and bold ideas remain unacted upon. We wanted to avoid that. As curators of the symposiums, we took on the responsibility of keeping momentum alive by initiating conversation threads after the workshop, helping participants formalize connections and identify next steps. This follow-through proved crucial: several of these conversations have now grown into active collaborations that extend beyond our own engagement. For us, this continuity is a real marker of success—evidence that the Ideas Collaborative was not just a moment of exchange, but the seedbed for ongoing collective action.
The Ideas Collaborative session was one step toward building more open, participatory, and action-oriented learning systems for adaptation. We saw clearly that participants valued structured, intentional space to share, test, and strengthen ideas—and to see others champion them.
But it also reinforced for us that this kind of collaboration doesn’t just “happen.” It needs to be deliberately designed, with space to reduce hierarchy, encourage feedback, and build early commitments and shared ownership. The learnings from this exercise have been a reminder to us to be deliberate about how we design learning spaces. To see the work of co-creation not as an add-on, but as essential.
Because if adaptation is to be locally led and effective, our learning systems need to move beyond sharing knowledge. They need to connect people, support relationships, and build the foundations for collective action.
At Transitions Research, we’re committed to supporting these processes wherever we work and we’d love to hear from others exploring similar approaches. If you’re a practitioner, donor, policymaker, or researcher thinking about these same questions, we’d love to hear from you.
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