Does co-creation lead to use of climate services in decision-making? A longitudinal evaluation of a co-creation process in Lesotho

Co-creation aims to involve end users, purveyors, and providers in iterative processes in the development of tailored climate services that are useful and usable. Such processes are key in producing grounded climate services that are salient, legitimate, relevant, and credible. These being noteworthy characteristics to bridge the existing usability gap between scientific innovation and use in decision-making.

Climate services have been co-created in developing countries over the years. However, there is a lack of clarity on whether and how co-creation processes lead to use, and how to organise such processes to facilitate effective upscaling and sustainable use.  As such, we aimed to uncover whether and how co-creation would lead to the use of a co-created climate service. We followed and critically evaluated the co-creation process for the Drought Early Action Protocol (and the revisions thereof) in the Lesotho Living Lab established under the I-CISK project. We applied the Contribution Analysis approach to evaluate the process with key stakeholders from the Lesotho Meteorological Services and the Lesotho Red Cross Society over a four-year period.

For the Lesotho Living Lab case, we first identified six pathways to ensuring use and explored how these interacted in the co-creation process and the Living Lab to contribute to the use of the climate service. Five of the six pathways showed some level of contribution to the use of the climate service. We found that two pathways:  i) embedding the climate service within an already existing decision-making context, and ii) incorporating the end-user needs in the co-created climate service were the primary contributing pathways towards the use of the climate service. We also unpack why capacity building of stakeholders as a pathway could not contribute to the use of the climate service to the extent that was expected and derive lessons from this experience.

We conclude by recommending ways to organise co-creation processes for researchers and practitioners, specifically those that are not fully embedded within the Living Labs in which they work. We emphasise pragmatic approaches towards initiating and sustaining co-creation processes as well as leveraging enablers in the context. This work provides grounded and empirical evidence that support co-creation as an approach that improves the use of climate services and contributes to facilitating learning and guiding the design of co-creation processes in the future.

Keywords:

Climate Services, Co-creation, Use, Lesotho, Evaluation, Six Pathways