Amy Zidulka (Royal Roads) , Ingrid Kajzer Mitchell (Royal Roads)
It is generally accepted that grand challenges like climate change cannot be addressed by a single organization and thus require multi-organizational arrangements across governmental jurisdictions and sectoral boundaries. However, such arrangements are difficult to achieve and require the development of collaborative capacity at the individual, organizational, and system levels. In the health system context, public organizations have come to recognize the need to work collaboratively with multiple actors to foster climate resilient health systems, which can anticipate, respond to, and adapt to climate-related events (WHO, 2015).
This presentation draws on findings from a study funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Health (Canada) aimed at identifying emerging practices in fostering inter-organizational collaboration for the purpose of building the foundation of a climate resilient health system. It reports on results from interviews with 17 key informants from Canada, United States and Australia, involved in collaborative initiatives; insights gained from a Knowledge Exchange Event; and a review of relevant documents. Analysis suggests that a dominant influence on how collaborative initiatives progressed and what outcomes they achieved was the newness of the climate-health intersection as an area of focus. The climate-health intersection could thus be understood to have low field coherence (Gray & Purdy, 2018), suggesting that it still lacks general agreement around how a problem should be defined, who should be invited to collaborative tables, and what a legitimate response might be. This low coherence impacted all aspects of the collaborative endeavour, including the competencies required of collaborative leaders.