Interventions for development, sustainability, and/or climate change adaptation have a history of ambiguous outcomes and outright failures. How can interventions, and especially those that involve government, research and stakeholders, including local residents, result in sustainable outcomes that persist beyond the intervention, and move towards climate change behaviour-change in the practice of all participants? Methodology & Theoretical Orientation: The underpinning methodology is transdisciplinary (TD). Critical realism provides a theoretical foundation for discerning causal mechanisms in complex systems using the full range of disciplinary enquiry. The concept of complex social-ecological systems (CSES) provides a lens to forefront the role adaptation and feed-back. Expansive learning provides the mechanisms to guide processes of co-learning and the co-development of knowledge.