City to city learning and knowledge exchange for climate resilience in southern Africa

implies iterative, reflective and feedback mechanisms. The use of these learning concepts have been on the rise, given funders’ recent (in the past decade) inclination towards larger-scale, impactful research that solves complex problems; versus the traditional and mere generation of new knowledge and the need for socially robust knowledge in adapting to climate change and building resilience [49]; [50]; [51]. Knowledge generation and sharing, as well as learning for implementation, have been emphasized as some of the important components of successful research, while underscoring the importance of learning from past experiences and scaling-up of successful models of adaptation and resilience approaches which encompass components of experiential learning [52]; [33]. Contextualizing city learning within a multi-country research project; the case of FRACTAL The Future Climate for African Cities And Lands (FRACTAL) research project employed and emphasized the use of city learning and contextualizing of issues, by understanding decision- making processes in cities as social learning concepts and in a bid to help build resilience through informed decision-making in the project’s study cities. This research project, which ran for a four-year period from 2015 to 2019; operated in nine cities in southern Africa, gave the participating cities impetus to learn together using a city-to-city or cross-city learning approach, and thus provided the basis for this paper. The specific goal of FRACTAL was to

advance scientific knowledge of the southern African regional climate responses to human drivers of climate change and enhance the integration of scientific climate knowledge into city regional decision-making for building resilience [42]. This was done by providing city-scale, co-produced, relevant and useful climate information for study cities in the region to help develop resilience through transdisciplinary research, which learns from and informs deci- sion-making. The focus is on university officials partnering with city practitioners in the pro- cess of formulating research questions framed around resilience, co-exploring solutions, and disseminating and presenting the findings within a transdisciplinary space, which allows time and space to disagree, debate, test alternatives and learn from mistakes; which in essence is experiential learning. The transdisciplinary research approach in FRACTAL has been opera- tionalized through a number of processes, such as a series of multi-city ‘learning labs’; the use of embedded researchers (ERs) as bridges between academia and city municipality administra- tions; as well as learning exchanges between multiple cities. It is this last approach which is the focus of our paper, and which outlines the processes and outcomes of this innovative way of research in multi-stakeholder engagement as an approach to increase learning, city resilience and improved urban planning. The FRACTAL project is hinged on four interconnected concepts and practices (transdisci-

plinary co-production (of knowledge), distillation (of climate information), receptivity and capacity development), which guide the learning and knowledge production as well as sharing processes. The aim of these concepts is to expand and (semi) formalize spaces of connection and co-production to be more inclusive, diverse and consequential; develop capacity to engage and know more, differently; develop receptivity to exercise agency in co-producing knowledge and decisions; and distill information through bringing it to bear on decisions [56]. Although the city exchange visits were conducted mainly to encourage and facilitate the transdisciplinary knowledge co-production concept [57]; the purposes of the other three concepts were also served well. During the city exchange visits, researchers, decision makers and practitioners from two or more cities shared experiences and learnt from each other about responding and adapting to (distilled) climate information, decision-making, city contexts and key issues as City learning in southern Africa PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227915 January 24, 2020 5 / 25