Pablo Suarez is associate director of programs for the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre. At the CDKN Action Lab he introduced participants to a challenging game to respond in the most effective way to the opposite threats of flood and drought. read more

Pamela Hartigan, Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University‟s Said Business School, may have surprised her case study group with her opening question as to why we are "trying to model our large-scale change from what we have learnt from the corporate sector."  read more

Riel Miller presents one of the keynotes with the title: "Climate Change, Embracing Complexity, and Change in the Conditions of Change." Oxford April 2011. read more

Luis Meneses Filho presenting his experiences working in the Amazon region on the REDD programme. Part of the CDKN Action Lab in Oxford, April 2011 read more

Open space sessions sample (Monday 4^th April)

Monday saw the participants act in self-organised workshop groups around common interests and themes. This is called Open Space Technology.  Participants were asked to pose a question or raise a topic for discussion. By doing this they would agree to host the discussion in one of the break-out rooms in the Exam Schools.  Topics ranged from biomass to youth social entrepreneurship, from climate compatible cities to costal adaptation and mitigation.

The conversations varied in size depending on who was interested in the topic and which one [...]

Nick Mabey is Chief Executive and a founder director of E3G (Third Generation Environmentalism) a non-profit international organisation dedicated to accelerating the transition to sustainable development. read more

Thais Corral, founder of CEMINA (Communication, Education, and Information on Gender) at the CDKN Action Lab in Oxford 2011 read more

Sebastian Moffatt, co-author of 'Eco2 Cities Ecological Cities as Economic Cities', talking at the CDKN Action Lab in Oxford, April 2011.  read more

A summary of Tim Harford's speech on day 2 of CDKN Action Lab: “How complex challenges can be solved and why success begins with failure” read more

Sam Gillick (LEAD International) reports: After a short break to re-caffeinate or refresh, the participants returned to plenary to see facilitators spread around holding continent labelled signs above their heads. Participants were asked to group below the continent of their birth and introduce themselves to others standing there. The exercise highlighted geographic diversity of participants and helped create the sense of community among them. read more

Bryony has been working on climate change for the last decade - she wrote the first report in the UK calling for the introduction of 'carbon budgets', was the brains behind the Friends of the Earth 'Big Ask' campaign, and helped the UK Government launch its first public awareness campaign read more

Day 2 - and a stunning plenary presentation by Tim Harford. Introduced as a 'writer, economist and thinker', Tim made a vivid case for the issues that flow from the sheer complexity of the modern world. read more

Day 1 - to make his points about leadership and innovation, our facilitator, Martin Kalungu-Banda, amazed the opening plenary with an unexpected illustration: the day that one of the '3 tenors' went off script... read more

The Action Lab gets underway with a lively introduction from the Chair of CDKN, Simon Maxwell. "The core idea that we have in the CDKN is about climate-compatible development...and that's where we need action - in the interface between climate and development... This is a vanguard event. And together our objective is to deliver climate-compatible development - and to change the world."  read more