Making sense together: Reflections from the collaborative retreat

When partners of The Collaborative for Systemic Climate Action gathered in Geneva in October 2025, we came with a shared goal of making sense of our work and the world around us. The question was simple: what signals of change are we seeing?The method we used was deliberate. We structured our sense making around two complementary frames: “What's Changing" and“Collaborating for Change" and moved through two rounds of reflection – outward and inward facing. We mapped what's breaking down and what's breaking through across political, social, economic, technological, and cultural dimensions. We then used a framework to help us examine what these shifts reveal about how relationships, practices, and governance arrangements either enable or limit systemic impact. We concluded by identifying emerging insights and their implications in small cross-cutting groups.

‍The Landscape We're Working In

‍What became clear is that we're operating in a moment of profound simultaneity. Democracy and multilateral institutions are eroding. The manipulation of narratives is weakening collective orientation, and facts themselves have become contested terrain. Yet at the same time, we're witnessing the emergence of local and place-based agency—communities and cities prototyping adaptive systems where national ones have stalled. Indigenous and relational knowledge systems are gaining recognition as legitimate bases for governance. Regenerative economic models are demonstrating that ecological and economic value can align. We noticed a pattern: society seems to be swinging between self-focused individualism and renewed spiritual-collective awareness, two contrasting ways of coping with instability. The collective mood leans toward more breaking down than breaking through, yet early signs of renewal are evident at the community scale. Perhaps most striking was the recognition that timing matters—windows of opportunity shape when and how systemic action can take root.

‍What Collaboration Is Teaching Us

‍When we turned the lens inward, we confronted some uncomfortable truths alongside encouraging ones. We acknowledged that we're still defining our shared identity — what we stand for, what distinct value we bring, and how we connect with others in the ecosystem. We recognized the gap between local practice and global ambition, and the structural funding constraints that still do not allow openness to break the pattern of competition.But we also saw where collaboration is working. It's strongest when it is designed into the work from the outset rather than added later as an embedded practice rather than an after thought. We're learning to shift from linear project delivery toward dynamic, connected experiments that reveal wider system patterns. We're recognizing that collaboration carries emotional as well as technical weight, and that feelings of hope, uncertainty, and fear can signal where collective capacity is expanding or under strain.
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Patterns Across the Portfolio

‍Several themes cut across both our external observations and internal learning. Systemic change is unfolding in spaces where breakdown and renewal coexist, calling for approaches that can work with disruption while enabling new forms to take root. Power and narrative continue to emerged as central levers for change. Control of story and meaning shapes what becomes legitimate and motivates collective action.We're recognizing that systemic impact depends on shifting from isolated projects to interacting experiments that learn across contexts and generate shared intelligence. This requires integrating plural knowledge systems like indigenous, scientific, and experiential intelligence, alongside new technological infrastructures.Perhaps most revealing was treating emotion as signal. Collective emotions like fatigue, uncertainty, and cautious optimism reveal how systems are responding to pressure.Tracking these emotional undercurrents helps gauge adaptive readiness and capacity for renewal, both within our own work and in the wider field.
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What This Means for Our Practice

‍Three implications are shaping how we understand our work going forward.

‍On collaboration: We're seeing that collaboration itself is a cultural experiment, a living laboratory for testing new ways of organizing, governing, and learning together. It becomes meaningful when difference is held rather than smoothed out, guided by shared identity and clarity about how we work together. The Collaborative is clarifying what collective identity, accountability, and agency can look like in complex systems.

‍On portfolio practice: Single projects cannot hold systemic complexity. A portfolio approach enables multiple experiments to interact, revealing dynamics that individual initiatives miss. It connects diverse efforts around shared questions, allowing insight to circulate and new meaning to emerge. This shifts the focus from delivering solutions to developing new possibilities through continuous learning.

‍On systemic change: Effective systemic action means learning and acting within volatility itself, not waiting for conditions to stabilize. With multilateral systems weakening and moral reference points in flux, we need to treat both breakdowns and breakthroughs as data for adaptation.

Carrying Forward

‍The session left us questions: How do we work with chaos rather than trying to control it? Where is the missing middle between global coordination and local initiative? How do we recognize and act on moments of opportunity within volatile conditions?

What we know is this: the Collaborative serves as a space where these questions can be held collectively, where different forms of knowledge and practice can interact, and where the work of systemic change can be approached as both deeply local and necessarily connected.