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“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” This quote by Albert Einstein highlights our need for new formats of communication to address the knowledge-action gap regarding climate change and other sustainability challenges. This includes reflection, and communication spaces, as well as methods and approaches that can catalyze the emergence of transformative change and action. In this article we present and reflect on experiments we carried out at international climate negotiations and conferences.

The international UN Climate Change conferences known as "Conferences of the Parties (COPs)" have an enormous convening power and are attended annually by tens of thousands of actors working on climate change topics from a wide range of perspectives. In the COP spaces outside of the formal negotiations, the communication culture is dominated by "side events," a format that relies heavily on conventional presentations and panels that can be informative, but is generally not conducive to mutual engagement, reflection, or dialogue. There is an urgent need for new dialogue formats that can better foster learning and community-building and thereby harness the enormous latent potential for climate action represented by the diverse stakeholders that gather at the COP. Against this backdrop, and drawing on our experience with the development and implementation of the Co-Creative Reflection and Dialogue Spaces at COP25, COP26, and COP27, we make recommendations for further developing the communication culture of the COPs. At the level of individual sessions, we provide recommendations for designing participatory dialogues that can better support reflection, interconnection, and action orientation. In addition, we offer guidance for scaling up these practices, for instance through networks and communities of practice to support a shift of the overall communication culture of the COPs. Our recommendations focus on interactions and exchanges that unfold outside of the formal negotiation sessions, with a view toward enabling and accelerating transformative action by non-state actors.

While calls for cross-sectoral collaboration have become a recurrent motif in sustainability-oriented policymaking and research, the practical realization of such processes presents significant challenges. The hope for “collaborative advantage” often gets traded for the experience of “collaborative impasse”, namely those moments in which collaboration gets stuck. To better understand the reasons underlying such impasses, the study focuses on the impact of facilitation artefacts—objects designed and used in collaborative practices. The study proposes an analytical heuristic of collaborative practices to investigate the data collected in an explorative study, tracing artefacts across three different communicative modes of deliberation. Detailed analysis of the case, grounded in audio–visual material, semi-structured interviews, photo documentation, and participatory observation, shows that such artefacts substantially influence the structure of the emerging interaction order in a given setting, and that unscripted and unsituated artefacts might contribute to reinforcing those communicative patterns that collaboration aims to contrast. The study identifies three relevant practices in facilitation work, in order to steer emerging interaction orders away from exclusionary dynamics: scripting, situating, and supervising. Although emerging from the micro-analysis of artefacts, these practices might apply to other spheres of collaboration and serve as orientation for successful collaborative processes.