ICLEI South Asia, the Asia Regional Coordinator for Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) programme, organised national-level engagement workshops in Nepal, Bangladesh and India on the 8th, 24th, and 29th of August 2019, respectively.

The workshops discussed CDKN’s activities in the three countries on the thematic priorities of the programme. They focused on identifying and addressing knowledge gaps at local, regional and national levels among various stakeholders, with the basic idea of identifying effective ways to disseminate knowledge on climate.

Based on their expertise, the participants worked in groups to identify knowledge gaps under the themes of Climate Finance, Water-Food-Energy Nexus, Gender Equity, Social Inclusion and Cities. Each group shared the challenges and knowledge gaps under the themes and came up with possible solutions to address such gaps. Theme-wise exercises and discussions proved to be useful in helping the participants understand the perspectives of the local decision makers as well as donor agencies in addressing the challenges on the ground.

The workshops in the three countries recognized that the capacity of local authorities needs to be built in order to achieve climate resilience and city-to-city learning exchanges can play a vital role in this. Knowledge products have to be contextualised based on the profile of their users. Interaction among various stakeholders at provincial, national and local levels, as well as representatives from organisations and communities is useful to the process of disseminating knowledge on climate.

Based on the participants’ feedback about knowledge gaps, CDKN Asia will now come up with a regional training module and conduct a training workshop in India, in November 2019.