Twenty-second International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Originating from organizational studies, the concept of knowledge management has increasingly adopted and developed in wider fields, one of them is climate change adaptation. As a global challenge which both academic and empirical understandings are constantly desired, climate change has taken significant considerations of various stakeholders, from academic scholars to policy makers, from local practitioners to external experts. Motivated by this very need, we aim to draw insight from a successful local climate change adaptation plan case in Botswana in terms of the knowledge interaction processes happened within it. A values-based process named WeValue In-Situ was used as a bolt-on process with the classical climate change adaptation plan process named Vulnerability Risk Assessment. This design was implemented and evaluated with the village development committees for three villages in Botswana. We adopted a well established and applied theory, namely Knowledge Creation Theory, to enable us in learning about knowledge interactions in empirical settings in the context of climate change adaptation. Our analysis showed that the WeValue In-Situ can effectively promote the Socialization and Externalization modes in the whole knowledge creation process of the planning making, through which the Combination and Internalization modes were enhanced accordingly in the later stage, as the shared tacit and explicit knowledge of the decision making group were better converted in WeValue In-Situ process. In this study, we present a hybrid knowledge management process which positively contributes to local climate change adaptation plan and share theoretical and empirical insights gained from this study.