Co-designing Climate Services for Agriculture - reflecting on successes, setbacks and early lessons learned

Climate Services for Agriculture (CSA) is a program of work that aims to improve the use of long-term (out to 2070) climate projections, to adapt Australian agriculture to climate change. The large, federally funded program aims to incorporate co-design with users to assure relevance and useability of the tool. Based on reflections on the program grounded in 84 interviews with farmers, advisors and researchers, this paper outlines some of the successes arising from different efforts to incorporate co-design into the program. These include design of different forms of engagement to maximise adoption and internal processes to encourage interdisciplinary innovation. We also outline some of the lessons learned through these efforts. We suggest co-design should include objective setting and problem framing with stakeholders before the work starts, and that co-development and co-delivery can still work even if co-design of objectives comes too late. The findings demonstrate the importance of ensuring the objectives underpinning co-design and co-development are outcome driven and relevant to user needs to improve adoption.