Critical change agent characteristics and competencies for ensuring systemic climate adaptation interventions

Rapidly changing global environmental contexts require thinking differently about climate adaptation projects to achieve faster positive systemic change. Adaptation theory and practice have begun to focus on change agents, people who can help catalyse this change, but it is poorly understood why some people are better able to influence positive systemic change or how climate adaptation projects cultivate and assist them in doing so. This paper synthesises insights on good practice for intervention design and implementation from a wide range of intervention literature domains, including health, education and international development. It identifies a distilled set of individual and collective change agent characteristics and competencies, grouped into five interconnecting themes: values, learning approaches, efficacy, roles and entrepreneurial tendencies. Nine core competencies are identified as important for enabling change, clustered into three themes: being good with people, learning or mastery skills, and adaptation competencies. The review also collates insights about how best to cultivate an agent’s capacity for catalysing change, with a particular focus on the potential for enabling climate adaptation through research for development. Initial insights suggest that capacity building needs to be more than developing new technical knowledge and skills; it should also focus on developing the necessary competencies for enabling change in intervention teams and potential change agents. These insights provide the basis for testing what combinations of change agent characteristics and competencies are most effective in different contexts, improving project and program design to cultivate change agents, and achieving systemic change.