Designing a Research Program Annual Learning Review
Sometimes we have assignments that involve working with people and being present at events so interesting and impressive that we'd pay to attend as participants! We're facilitating the third Annual Learning Review (ALR3) of the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA) program in Nepal this May.We've been working with CARIAA in one form or another for most of its' five year life, beginning with the set up of a collaborative KM platform based in the Google Apps for Work for their CARIAA research programme - and some subsequent work to create an M&E dashboard using the same technology. During 2017 we also worked to support Knowledge Management and Learning processes across the program, including the facilitation of the second Annual Learning Review.
This is the first blog in a series where we will share our experience of co-creating the event design and facilitating the four-day programme, partly as a lead-in to the next FacilitationAnywhere training workshop in June. In this post we briefly describe what makes CARIAA such a remarkable initiative and some of the immediate challenges in putting together an agenda with the potential to enable participants meet its ambitious goals.
Hot-spots and collaboration
The combination or scale and depth is one of the things I find so impressive about CARIAA. The program, "aims to build the resilience of poor people to climate change by supporting a network of four consortia to conduct high-calibre research and policy engagement" in what it calls hot spots, in Africa and Asia. The program focuses on three types of hot spots in Africa and South Asia: semi-arid regions; deltas; and glacier and snow-pack dependent river basins in South Asia. Each of these hot spots combine vulnerability to the extreme effects of climate change as well as a large concentration of poor populations. Hot spots are seen as a lens for research on common challenges across different contexts.
The West-Vigne glacier is a headwater of the Indus © Ahmad Abdul Karim
Pause for a moment and unpack, 'snow-pack dependent river basins in South Asia'. "The Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region, the source of ten large river systems of Asia, provides water and other ecosystem services to more than 210 million people living in the mountains and over 1.3 billion living in the plains" The HI-AWARE consortium, who are hosting ALR3, is therefore working across Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh, undertaking original research and seeking to find common threads and original solutions across that enormous region. The other three consortium are similarly engaged in attempting to both synthesise research findings across their own huge focus areas, and with HI-AWARE also to find common threads that can be shared globally. There are other similar programs, including larger ones like BRACED, but it's this determination to do more than simply share results and hold joint events that makes CARIAA different: it's such an ambitious undertaking, and in a seven-year program.
Research on climate change adaptation demands collaboration. So the different consortia bring together researchers and practitioners, from the North and the South, with different backgrounds and expertise, to create and share knowledge. This consortium-based model is itself innovative and not yet seen as mainstream in research for development. It emphasises collaborating and learning within both within and between the consortia involved in the Program, as well as with other initiatives. So another striking feature of the Program is the embedded mechanisms in place for knowledge exchange across the four consortia, aiming for syntheses of emerging research findings, and a structured learning process over time.
In the remainder of this blog on FacilitationAnywhere.net we explain more about the concepts behind the third Annual Learning Review, and some our our early thinking on the agenda as we joined the planning process.