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Given the wide range of situations in which adaptation takes place there can be single formula for undertaking decision-making for adaptation especially given adaptation is not the only motivation for the work and certainly may not be seen as the most critical issue by some of the people who need to be engaged in the decision-making. Some important elements might be considered to be:

1. a set of co-created principles
2. a participatory and inclusive process
3.  a set of tools or techniques to use to help understand the situation from different perspectives but not held too rigidly. The most important thing is to have clarity about what it is you need to understand to be able to make the decision as well as possible, who you need to engage in the process and opportunities to ‘quality check’ the process to enable those involved to reflect on how confident they feel about how well the process is capturing the issues of importance.

In projects where the aim is to get stakeholder engagement and community ownership and outcomes that build capacity to deal with climate change the joint definition of underlying principles and the design of an open and inclusive process is as least as important as describing specific tools. Having a clear set of principles helps in designing the details of the process, deciding what types of tools should be used and how the work can most effectively be monitored and evaluated (see the Pathfinder section on Monitoring and evaluation).

Identifying principles to guide the work
No one set of principles can be defined for all adaptation work as they are context specific and will change depending on the scale, scope and level of depth the work it hoping to attain. The process of articulating important principles for the way the work should be undertaking in the project and deciding which to use with the key people involved can provide a useful opportunity to open up conversation about different and shared values and motivations for participating in the team and the range of experience of those taking part that provide a useful grounding for the work. The principles can then be used to guide how you design the process, for example, how stakeholders need to be engaged, what the definition of a successful outcome might be and what indicators might be used in the monitoring and evaluation processes.

Examples of principles in practice

Principles developed for running participatory community projects: Must involve and be useful to the project end users (key stakeholders). Who these people are depends on the context Must be rooted in the concerns and interests of the local people Methodologies used must respect the knowledge and experience that all participants bring to the project. There is an emphasis on learning and knowledge for action There is a joint process of knowledge acquisition and generation There is a sharing of power between funders, facilitators and end users in the project The project team continuously and critically examines his or her own attitudes, ideas and behaviours. There is an ethos of admitting and learning from mistakes, thinking about what is seen and not seen, shown and not shown, what is shared and how it is selected and shaped. The process must acknowledge and address inequalities of power and voice amongst participating stakeholders The process is developing social action for change and it is thus explicitly political ––transforming power relations in order to empower the marginalised. The project team is not made up of objective scientists The work has an explicit aim to build capacity and thus there has to be an action component for it to be of use to the end users. The evaluation process draws on the experience of all involved in the process (e.g. funders, team members, experts, beneficiaries)and is seen as an opportunity to learn and improve

Box 1: Community Project Principles (Bobbet and Rowley)

The weADAPT platform is based on common and evolving set of principles for climate adaptation and collaborative capacity building. Examples include: Adaptation is a process of social and institutional learning that produce adaptation outcomes and processes that are robust against a wide range of future situations while recognizing the existence of competing stakeholder goals and processes.  Adaptation decisions depend on the context - both environmental and social and there is no generic set of solutions that can ‘solve’ adaptation. Adaptation processes must be grounded in the local environmental, climatic, social and political realities. The perspectives of those involved in the decision process, or affected by it, is thus vital in determining what is an appropriate strategy. Information needs to be 'good enough' to make a decision but we do not, and cannot know every last detail. The key is to understand what information is sufficient in order to make an informed decision, rather than having all possible information available. Adaptation strategies need to be robust against a wide range of possible future scenarios (both climatic and socio-economic). Basing adaptation strategies on one single scenario of the future could easily lead to maladaptation as we cannot be certain of future conditions. Robust in this context means strategies that will be beneficial under a range of possible scenarios for the future, rather than being reliant on certain conditions occurring. Tools are a means of getting to a solution, they do not provide all the answers themselves! Tools should never be used to replace thought and reflection on the problem. Motto: Every tool is good for something, no tool is good for everything! Adaptation strategies should address present needs, while at the same time building capacity to deal with future change. Current problems will always be perceived as more important than potential future problems, so if we do not start by addressing immediate needs adaptation strategies are unlikely to be given priority. As current problems often undermine the ability to cope with changes in climate, so not addressing them will make it harder to deal with the large negative effects climate change is likely to bring. Using multiple methods to address a problem is likely to give more robust results than relying on only one. In most situations there is no single tool or method that is empirically the best. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. In using multiple methods we can compare whether they give similar information and priorities making the output more trustworthy. Enduring partnerships are essential for building adaptive capacity. Enduring partnerships, between experts and practitioners, multiple stakeholders and across scales, are essential for building adaptive capacity over the time scales required by climate change. Such partnerships rest on shared purpose, principles and vision, and fairness and trust in working together. Capacity-building must be a process rather than a one-off event, and this requires trust, strong relationships and long-term commitment. Real capacity is built by using and applying knowledge and skills gained in everyday work, and then learning from this.  Capacitybuilding thus requires not only training workshops, but also partnerships and collaborative working. 2-way dialogues are the basis of building consensus, partnerships and the exchange of useful information for decision-making. It is only through prolonged dialogue where both parties respect and learn from each other that trust is built and true collaboration can begin. Adaptation should not be about experts pushing pre-packaged information to users, but rather about learning each other’s needs and being able to exchange information that is useful for decision-making. This is the basis of a social learning approach. Adaptation requires sharing knowledge and learning from each other. Many adaptation initiatives exist; the sharing of ideas, methods and best practice is important for promoting good adaptation. Creativity and innovation are key to adaptation, and will be fostered through the connection and exchange of different types of knowledge and ideas. Effective networks for adaptation require strong cooperation between organizations and mechanisms for sharing, generating and applying knowledge

Box 2: Platform Principles

Participatory process design

Process design is often seen secondary to content in a project however, in collaborative projects that are to be owned and lead by all, with outcomes that build capacity to deal with climate change the process is as least as important as the recommendations and results contained in the project report. The design of the process should allow everyone involved to understand their own role in the various stages and how the pieces fit together to achieve the objectives. Visual images that explain the decision making process and how people’s inputs are used in it may help to illustrate this more clearly and to clarify expectations. Ideally there should be multiple opportunities for the key players to actively engage as the design develops.

Adaptation is not a linear process, but it is often presented in this way for the sake of simplicity. Iterative with elements of ‘surprise’ that challenge the inevitably partial and inadequate framing, challenges to assumptions about how change happens and unforeseen consequences of interventions. Thus only so much of the process in practice can be presented in a linear way. A good collaborative adaptation process is composed of iterative cycles of learning that deepen and focus the inquiry into what will support effective adaptation in a given context. Seeing it as a process of learning allows you to be open to not knowing precisely what will emerge but that you will work it out during the process and design opportunities for reflecting and reassessing the process and changing the focus as necessary to keep the work on track. It might thus be better presented as a loop that becomes a ‘coil’ of loops as the process continues.