Capacity development for locally-led knowledge co-production processes in Real World Labs for managing climate and disaster risk

Knowledge co-production processes are increasingly used to promote transdisciplinary collaboration and integration of knowledge across scales to better understand and govern complex sustainability challenges. However, existing literature tends to overlook the capacities and skills required for designing, researching and facilitating such processes, and the empirical evidence base demonstrating their benefits remains narrow. For example, practical guidance and training for locally-led design and implementation of knowledge co-production processes is scarce. In this paper, we explore capacities for enabling such processes, and the skills that underpin them as well as those that emerge from them based on lessons learned from the implementation of the DIRECTED project. The project develops the capacity of practitioners from four regional Real World Labs in Denmark, Italy, Germany, and Austria/ Hungary to design, research and facilitate knowledge co-production to address their local and regional disaster risk and climate adaptation-related challenges. The process seeks to support knowledge integration and influence integrated planning, policy and interoperable tool development through transdisciplinary collaboration. The paper puts forward a structure for the four key capacities (collaborative, systems thinking, creative and reflexive capacities) and related skills needed by both Real World Lab practitioner hosts and academic researchers, to enable knowledge co-production, along with findings demonstrating how these have influenced the evolving activities designed by Real World Lab hosts. Reflections are provided on how to inform knowledge co-production applications to better integrate considerations of capacities and skills required by practitioners and academics.