Exploring creative play to enhance multi-stakeholder climate and disaster risk communication and knowledge co-production

Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) practitioners are increasingly encouraged to strengthen communication and engagement with multiple organisations and citizens to support inclusive and multi-level risk governance (Renn and Schweizer, 2009; Newig and Fritsch, 2009). Knowledge co-production processes and tools can support engagement across a wide range of stakeholders across the science-society interface, representing a diversity of disciplines, sectors, skills and knowledge types (Norstrom et al. 2020; Daniels et al. 2020). Such processes, encourage experimentation, creativity and learning in novel ways to help break down disciplinary barriers, encourage open dialogue, build trust and guide processes towards transdisciplinary solutions.

Creating spaces for play has been recognised to encourage, stimulate and facilitate creativity in organisational settings by creating a diversion and temporarily suspending obligations and pressures (Mainemelis and Ronson, 2006). Here we present the use of a Creative Play approach within knowledge co-production workshops for Real World Labs Risk-Tandem training as part of the Directed project (EU Horizon) and a workshop exploring risk communication strategies in Cork city as part of the Promoting Resilient Cities through Community Participation and Communication of Climate and Disaster Risks (PROCOMMS) UNIC seed-funded project. Creative play in this context involves the use of tactile materials, such as lollypop sticks, play doh, pipe cleaners and coloured card, to support the participants in their discussions and idea generation, to enable unstructured exploration of issues at hand. The Real World Lab training application helped identify target groups, knowledge capacities and needs and communication solutions. The PROCOMMS workshop also generated information on target groups and co-explored risk communication strategies to meet the needs of specific target groups including elderly, members of the Traveller community, businesses, and local residents. The results included 3D creations of risk communication solutions, such as awareness raising fridge magnets for the elderly. In both cases, the creative play approach enabled a fun and dynamic atmosphere, helping to encourage participation, break down disciplinary barriers, overcome formalities, communicate similarities and differences, and help frame and focus emerging ideas.

The session will also highlight plans for Directed Real World Labs to implement knowledge co-production processes and the ‘living’ good practices guide on risk communication and community engagement being developed by the PROCOMMS project.

References:

Daniels, E., et al. (2020). Refocusing the climate services lens: Introducing a framework for co-designing “transdisciplinary knowledge integration processes” to build climate resilience. Climate Services, 19. 100181. DOI: 10.1016/j.cliser.2020.100181

Directed Project (EU Horizon, 2022- 2026). Real World Labs. Available at: https://directedproject.eu/about/#real-world-labs

Mainemelis, C., & Ronson, S. (2006). Ideas are born in fields of play: Towards a theory of play and creativity in organizational settings. Research in organizational behavior, 27, 81-131.

Newig, J., and O. Fritsch. (2009). ‘Environmental Governance: Participatory, multi-level – and effective?’ Environmental Policy and Governance 19(3):197–214

Norström, A. V., Cvitanovic, C., Löf, M. F., West, S., Wyborn, C., et al. (2020). Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. Nature Sustainability, 3(3). 182–90. DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2

Renn, O., & Schweizer, P.-J. (2009). Inclusive risk governance: concepts and application to environmental policy making. Environmental Policy and Governance, 19(3), 174–185.