Some of the most important work in a research programme happens in the quiet decisions of a room: who is invited to speak first, whose knowledge is treated as expertise, how power dynamics are handled, whether a carefully planned agenda is allowed to bend when the people in front of you need it to. This is the craft of facilitation, and it rarely draws attention to itself.

Over the past year, two CASCADE fellows have been enhancing their facilitation skills for complex climate and health spaces. Romyne Karan and Lilian Namuma S. Kong’ani are both fellows on the CLARE Programme’s Innovative Facilitation for Resilience Fellowship, and are integrating what they have learnt back into CASCADE’s work on climate and health in African cities and beyond.
The fellowship helps researchers and practitioners strengthen the way they design and hold engagement processes, with an emphasis on applied improvisation, reflexivity and working with uncertainty. It treats facilitation not as logistics, but as a skilled practice of creating the conditions in which people can learn from one another and act together.

Romyne, CASCADE’s Academic Research Coordinator and Lilian, a CASCADE Postdoctoral Fellow, are based at the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG), University of Cape Town.

The fellowship’s focus sits naturally alongside CASCADE. Its transdisciplinary approach brings researchers, city actors, practitioners and residents into the same learning process, and understanding climate and health risks depends as much on whose knowledge is heard and trusted as on the evidence itself. Facilitation is where much of that is decided, which makes it central to the science, not incidental to it.

Holding a transdisciplinary process with care

For Romyne, the fellowship gave form to something she had long felt but never quite acted on.

“Before the fellowship, I always knew that facilitation was so much more than trying to guide people towards an outcome,” she reflects. “Unfortunately, I always felt that the tools were missing and I did not know how to find them.”

What changed was where she now places the centre of her role. Rather than steering a group towards a set destination, she has come to see facilitation as creating the conditions for meaningful participation: a space for reflection, for feeling safe, and for collective sensemaking. It is a shift from directing a room to holding it.

“…it really isn’t about trying to steer the direction, but instead being able to recognise the power of facilitation and my positionality as a facilitator. This means being able to identify power dynamics, whose voice feels dominant, who may be holding back, whose knowledge is acknowledged over others, and being willing to shift course and let go of a well-planned programme if it does not serve the space well.”

Romyne has become far more conscious of the human dynamics at play: whose voice feels dominant and who is holding back, whose knowledge is acknowledged over others. Reading those currents as they move allows her to adapt and, when it matters, let go of a well-planned programme because it is not serving the people in the room.

The Responsive Dialogues in Khayelitsha became one of the places where these ideas were tested. “I was encouraged to use creative methods to promote dialogue in a space with many vulnerable stories,” she says. The fellowship gave her tools to widen participation and build trust, so that residents’ experiences, rather than a fixed agenda, shaped where the dialogues went.

One principle stands out for her more than any other: creating space rather than just filling it. “This is about being intentional with my listening and allowing people to take the lead on conversations they would otherwise shy away from,” she explains.
Looking ahead, Romyne wants to keep using her facilitation skills to strengthen relationships with peers, partners and collaborators, and to encourage people to contribute, question and challenge one another.

Creating space for dialogue across differences

Lilian came to the fellowship already experienced in mediation and environmental governance, well practised in managing differences when people are brought together. The fellowship reframed that starting point entirely.

For her, facilitation is now less about managing differences than about intentionally creating the conditions for people to learn from one another, connect and co-create. The focus on applied improvisation strengthened her ability to work with uncertainty and adapt in the moment. “A facilitator does not need to know everything or drive the process,” she says. “The purpose is to create the conditions for participants to collectively generate insight and action.”

That insight matters most where power and knowledge are unevenly held, as they almost always are in urban climate and health governance. “Convening diverse actors into the same space does not automatically translate into making participation meaningful”, says Lilian. Real inclusion asks the facilitator to attend deliberately to differences in power, knowledge, ways of communicating, voice and confidence, and to design spaces in which participants can genuinely shape the questions, knowledge and decisions that emerge.

I learned that convening diverse actors into the same space does not automatically translate into making participation meaningful, and there is therefore a need to ensure facilitation, deliberately attending to potential differences in power, knowledge, ways of communicating, voice, as well as confidence.

Her experience with CASCADE’s City Learning Labs reinforced this. Bringing researchers, practitioners, local authorities and community members into the same room, she found, is only the beginning; the harder work is designing a process through which different forms of knowledge can actually inform the conversation. It has led her to watch the less visible dimensions of participation closely: who sets the agenda, who feels safe to speak, whose concepts are understood, whose knowledge is treated as legitimate, and who ultimately shapes what is taken forward.

Looking ahead, Lilian hopes to ground facilitation more intentionally across her research and engagement work, from co-designing research agendas to interpreting findings alongside communities, decision-makers and practitioners. She is also keen to treat dissemination itself as a form of facilitation, making outputs such as presentations and policy briefs more accessible, dialogic and genuinely useful, rather than simply transmitting findings.

A shared way of working

Romyne and Lilian describe the same movement from different starting points: away from control and towards care, away from transmitting knowledge and towards making room for it. For a programme like CASCADE, where understanding climate and health risks depends on many kinds of expertise sitting in the same room as equals, this is an essential skill, and central to how science reaches the people it is meant to serve.

By Hugo De Lemos

Photos by Eh!woza