Enhancing the usefulness and usability of Drought Early Action Protocols through co-creation

The lack of saliency, credibility, and legitimacy of information in climate services constrains their use in decision-making. Co-creation processes involve end users, purveyors, and providers in an iterative approach to develop tailored climate services that are useful and usable. Such approaches facilitate contextual understanding, integrate different knowledges, and are key in bridging the gap between innovation and use.

Co-creation approaches have been applied in climate service development over the past years. However, there has been little exploration on whether and how the process can be organised to ensure that the co-created climate services are sustainably used. Unpacking this relationship between co-creation and use enables an understanding of the factors to consider, and pathways to follow when co-creating climate services to effectively upscale innovation and sustainable use in decision-making.

This research aims to identify the pathways through which co-creation processes contribute towards the use of climate services in decision-making. We follow and critically evaluate an ongoing co-creation process for the development of a Drought Early Action Protocol (and the revisions thereof) in Lesotho. We apply the Contribution Analysis method to evaluate the process with key stakeholders from the Lesotho Meteorological Services, the Disaster Management Agency, and the Lesotho Red Cross Society. Preliminary findings suggest that a combination of i) embedding the climate service in an already existing decision-making framework, ii) actively building the capacity of institutional staff to use the climate service, and iii) providing avenues for maintenance after the co-creation process, is a likely pathway a co-creation process may take towards ensuring use of the climate service. This work is beneficial to practitioners and researchers as it provides an empirically grounded explanatory account of the relationship between co-creation and the use of climate services.