Climate adaptation research can involve communities and other stakeholders in shaping knowledge. But participation alone does not guarantee fairer decisions or deeper change. In an essay published in PLOS Climate, Katherine Cann argues that engaged research could help move adaptation science toward more transformative outcomes—if researchers and funders address the power and procedural problems that can undermine it.
Transformative adaptation, as Cann describes it, involves fundamental changes to the social systems and relationships that shape vulnerability to climate risks. Much adaptation practice, she writes, still favors incremental, top-down and technology-centered infrastructure. If adaptation practice is to change, the science informing it may also need to change. Engaged research—including co-production and participatory action research—aims to bring different knowledge systems, institutions and stakeholders into collaborative knowledge-making. That approach may make research more relevant to decisions and more attentive to local experience and governance.
Cann’s article is an essay informed by an extended review of recent literature in adaptation, climate services, sustainability science and environmental governance. The review took place over three years, but its methodology was not formally designed; it aimed to gather lessons from many highly cited papers. Cann says the resulting themes are broad and do not represent all the debates in this large field. They are a guide to recurring ethical and procedural tensions, rather than a systematic test of whether a particular engagement method works.
Four themes stand out: power and politics, Indigenous and local knowledge, equity, and governance. Collaboration can give people outside research institutions greater influence over what questions are asked and what counts as useful knowledge. But imbalances between institutional researchers and other partners may persist. If those imbalances go unaddressed, projects intended to be collaborative can repeat patterns of exclusion or knowledge extraction. Efforts to depoliticize research and force agreement can also sideline views that challenge established priorities.
The potential and risks appear in examples Cann discusses from earlier research. In Cape Town, South Africa, a project used storytelling and quantitative data collection to develop knowledge about water governance; community groups became trusted climate knowledge brokers and were invited by city officials to help guide public policy. In a drought-planning process in Santiago, Chile, a project described as participatory privileged elite views over those of marginalized communities, limiting debate after those communities pushed for national water reforms. These examples, drawn from the literature, illustrate why the label “participatory” is not enough to establish that a process is equitable.
Cann proposes three priorities for improving engaged research. First, researchers should question how a project’s goals are set and whose ideas of climate risk, justice and adaptation shape its design. Inviting more participants does not by itself reveal how those underlying assumptions influence decisions. Second, projects should make room for social learning: the new relationships, shared understanding and solidarity that can develop through collaboration. Such outcomes may matter even when producing a formal research output is not the project’s main success.
Third, researchers and funders should evaluate how engaged work is governed, including who controls funding, research design and the sharing of results. Cann points to practices such as giving partners more equal control over funds, co-designing questions and sharing findings in different formats. She also describes recurring obstacles: limited time, difficulties paying partners promptly and insufficient money for data needs. Small nonprofit partners may have to pay engagement costs upfront, which can make participation impossible for some organizations.
These governance questions continue beyond a project’s launch. Relationships may need support after grant funding ends, but the literature Cann reviews has paid little attention to how to sustain them—or when expecting unpaid partners to remain involved would be unfair. Evaluation poses another challenge: measures focused on short-term, countable outputs may miss longer-term social or material changes, while changes in adaptation are difficult to attribute and assess over time.
Cann’s argument is not that engagement automatically transforms climate adaptation. It is that collaborative methods have potential, while their outcomes depend on how aims, learning and governance are handled. Treating participation as a process to examine and evaluate, rather than as proof of equity, could help researchers and funders identify both the benefits and the limits of engaged work.