SILP Learning Festival 2026
SILP Learning Festival 2026
March 10 @ 10:00 - March 12 @ 13:00
The Systems Innovation Learning Partnership, a collaboration between the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and Climate KIC, is back with a new edition of the Learning Festival.
The Learning Festival is an invitation to pause, learn together and make sense of reality without collapsing into urgency, oversimplification or performance.
Across three days, we’ll explore how narratives, funding practices and collective learning shape what becomes possible in complex systems.
To help us process reality in all it’s heaviness, we’re inviting a comedian to accompany us in the festival to remind us that humour can be the most honest form of being with such harsh realities.
Day 1: Climate narratives in action: Attention, trust, and imagining alternative futures
Tuesday 10th March 10-12.30 CET
With backtracking climate commitments, shrinking budgets and shifting geopolitical tensions, it can feel so difficult to reach the people needed for meaningful, global climate action.
Yet climate narratives continue to travel through mainstream routes like Hollywood and through quieter, less obvious pathways like choirs, communities and culture.
Day 1 invites you into a kaleidoscopic exploration of climate narratives: where they come from, how they shape attention and trust, and how they open (or close) our ability to imagine alternative futures.
With conversation partners from diverse spaces, we’ll explore how different forms of storytelling and inherited narratives are being used to:
- Capture attention
- Shape attitudes and behaviour
- Illustrate possible futures
- Create momentum for climate action
This is a space to pause the churn of urgency, question what stories are doing in the world, and reflect on the responsibility we carry in the narratives we amplify.
Day 2: In-between Spaces: Intermediaries rethinking funding practices
Wednesday 11th March 10-12.30 CET
If you’re holding relationships that don’t neatly align, translating between languages that don’t quite match, expected to deliver certainty in situations defined by uncertainty. Accountable to multiple worlds of funders, communities, institutions all with different incentives, timelines, and definitions of success.
This is the work of being in-between.
Day 2 marks the launch of the Rethinking Intermediaries Series report — a learning paper emerging from shared inquiry with intermediary funders and ecosystem support organisations navigating this in-between space.
Together, we’ll explore live examples of experimental practice spaces in funding and relational work, opening honest conversations about:
- The challenges of working across worlds
- What experimentation looks like in practice
- How intermediaries are finding new ways to work with complexity
This day is designed as a learning space… not to resolve tension but to understand it more deeply.
Day 3: Systems Innovation Learning Horizons (Closed Group)
Thursday 12th March 10.00-13.00 CET
The 2026 SILP Learning Festival will close the current lifecycle of the SILP programme.
Day 3 will see an invitation-only gathering of some of Climate KIC’s closest partners and collaborators, and some new friends, come together in an intentional space to pause and reflect on what we are collectively learning about working in, with, and on complex systems.
Together, we will:
- Reflect on emerging insights from systems innovation practice
- Share live learning and challenges from our own work
- Explore the evolving landscape of systems innovation
- Surface collective needs and opportunities for future learning
This is a space for honest sense-making, shared reflection and imagining what learning horizons might come next.
If you would like to be a part of this closed group, please email jessamy.hardie@climate-kic.org (and cc will@orbitallearning.io)
