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

well as solutions. In the process, receptivity was created to new, innovative, climate change action-related ideas and approaches in other cities, with the aim of advancing capacity to respond likewise in their own contexts. FRACTAL city learning approach. The FRACTAL city learning process was founded on the understanding that cities function as complex ecosystems and that the learning component is an important facet for engaging city decision makers and practitioners, among other facets, such as the development of climate services information. In the learning process, city labs were used as an important platform for promoting dialogue and learning, through which the explo- ration of solutions, drawing on both research and practice and the expertise of participants was done. The labs provided a space where academia, civil society, city and government offi- cials interacted, co-identified and prioritized projects, mapped out problems and co- produced potential solutions to prioritized projects within the cities. The learning-by-doing and engage- ment approaches were emphasized in the labs [32]. In this approach, participants recognized that learning is not limited to individual city stakeholders, but rather, that the learning fora should be extended to other FRACTAL cities that exhibit similar issues or have innovations that another city could benefit and learn from. Following this approach, the FRACTAL city learning visits were co-designed to ensure that cross-learning from experiences, lessons, best practices and failures which were drawn by a

wide range of participants from the visiting and visited city were demonstrated. The goal of the exchange visits was to encourage inter-city learning and to strengthen relationships and foster partnerships, as well as contribute towards capacity development given that challenges faced by southern African cities can be similar. Another aim of the exchange visits was to pro- vide a visual of the risks faced and processes being undertaken in the respective cities, and to share lessons from good practices (and failures) through specific site visits. The idea was that visitors would then take the learning and experiences back to their cities and institutions for further knowledge sharing as well as championing the implementation of some of the aspects learnt. In addition, the city learning exchanges further provided the opportunity to co-identify similar problems across the FRACTAL cities participating in the exchange visits, co-develop solutions and cross pollinate on viable decisions that could be made to build resilience to the effects of climate change in cities. Co-production of outputs was also promoted and facilitated as the learnings were disseminated through various media such as blogs and reports that were co-authored by the city officials, early career and embedded researchers and local university academics from the cities involved in the learning exchanges. In all the city exchanges, empha- sis was placed on a systems approach in understanding context, values, and city-specific issues

while social and experiential learning and building relationships and equal partnerships stood out as major themes. This is important in the context of the (southern) African region, where mostly top-down concepts have been imposed without understanding and considering the local context in intervention program designs. Materials and methods Between August 2017 and February 2018, the cities of Harare, Windhoek, Lusaka and Durban conducted learning exchanges through START International’s Global Environmental Change (GEC) Research in Africa and Small Opportunity Grants (SOGs) under the FRACTAL project. The visits brought together key city actors and academic researchers to share knowledge and experiences related to the on-going water (energy) and climate change work in the cities of Harare (Zimbabwe), Windhoek (Namibia), Lusaka (Zambia) and Durban (South Africa) (see Fig 1 for exchange visit routes). City learning in southern Africa PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227915 January 24, 2020 6 / 25