Amplification of climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction solutions across urban scales: multi-organisation team-based experiments for sustainability transformations

Disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation is not simply the domain of international organizations operating under multilateral agreements, but a deeply place-based set of tasks that play out at the sub-national and local scales. Design and implementation of solutions, therefore, requires involvement from the sub-national public sector, civil society, academia and businesses, investing in solutions that accelerate progress towards sustainable and disaster-resilient development. Recent achievements in this regard, howevever have remained limited in both scale and depth, insufficient to prompt a more transformative shift towards low-carbon resilience. In this article, we present a transdisciplinary capacity-building and experimentation methodology that was deployed to co-produce and amplify locally driven solutions. Through data gathered throughout a multi-year series of interviews, focus groups, capacity-building events, and experiment design sessions, we propose that this model can accelerate building capability of teams within an ecosystem of actors to experiment with (and amplify) business practices that support sustainability transitions. We futher argue that capacity should be generated and enhanced, iteratively, throughout the experimentation process, and the requuirements for funding and supporting initaives should minimize barriers for accelerate real world impact of these types of solutions. The process we tested raises continued questions about how transdisciplinary sustainability scientists might deepen their understanding of the many roles that researchers play within these processes: as sources of expertise, as strategic facilitators, as observers, and as advocates.