Applying design thinking for innovative climate adaptation solutions: Building capacity for locally led adaptation

Abstract

Efforts to translate climate risk understanding into actions with positive developmental outcomes remain limited. Calls for Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) emphasize the importance of enabling local actors to define, prioritise, and design their own solutions, but practical methodologies to support this remain underdeveloped. This paper examines how design thinking, integrated with systems thinking, can structure and support co-creative adaptation processes that foster social innovation. Drawing on the Design for Climate Solutions (D4CS) pilot programme in South Africa, we examine how four multi-actor teams, spanning government, private sector, civil society, and research, co-designed and prototyped adaptation solutions in a iterative sprint process. The findings demonstrate that design thinking methods fostered engagement with complex, context-specific climate challenges by centring user needs, enabling iterative experimentation, and prompting reflection on social and institutional dynamics. This approach enhanced relational capacities and supported coalition-building across actor groups. Challenges included sustaining participation, addressing power dynamics, and developing viable prototypes. By aligning LLA principles with innovation-oriented processes, the findings suggest that the design sprint was less about producing solutions ready to be financed and implemented and more about process learning, developing foundational skills (e.g. collaborative problem (re)framing, multi-perspective thinking) and building systems understandings that strengthen adaptive capacities for ongoing climate adaptation. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential of structured co-design methodologies, aligned with social innovation principles, to support locally led and transformative adaptation outcomes.