Evaluation of GLISA’s Small Grants Program

Abstract

Since 2011, the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments (GLISA) has competitively awarded small grants to regional organizations (hereafter “boundary organizations”) committed to increasing the use of climate information in support of decision-making that addresses our larger mission of reducing the risks of climate variability and change in the Great Lakes region. These organizations often stand at the boundary between the production of climate knowledge by GLISA’s universities/partner scientific organizations and practitioners making decisions about adapting to climate change impacts. In the Small Grants Program (hereafter “the Program”), each boundary organization receives US$50K one-year grants to address concerns related to climate adaptation and mitigation across a diversity of sectors, geographies, and disciplines. Within GLISA, the Program has two main goals. The first is to scale up our presence and impact in the Great Lakes region by partnering with other organizations that help us to efficiently increase the breadth and depth of the RISA co-production model of interacting closely and frequently with practitioners across sectors, geographies and disciplines. By partnering with these organizations, we can reach a broader number of practitioners and other stakeholders, as well as manage several projects at the same time. The second goal is to test an experimental funding model, the Adaptive Boundary Chain Model (“ABCM,” Figure 1) , which links several boundary organizations to co-create usable climate information with practitioners (Lemos et al. 2014). The main goal of the ABCM is to decrease the often high transaction costs associated with sustained practitioner engagement. These costs include time commitment, logistics, as well as financial and human resources – but especially the high and often intangible cost of building trust and legitimacy in an interconnected chain of scientific institutions, boundary organizations, communities, and individuals. By putting funding into the hands of boundary organizations with existing relationships with practitioners, the tasks of network building, further building adaptive capacity, and co-producing knowledge is made easier – and costs are shared throughout the chain.