EcoAdapt (www.ecoadapt.eu) is an ambitious, complex and demanding action-research project about water security in a context of climate change. The issues the project deals with are also complex and demanding. A central challenge is how to get the investigators, the project partner Model Forest local teams and the relevant local actors in the territories on the same page. That is why joint knowledge development and shared learning from different sources and ways of knowing is of such strategic importance in EcoAdapt. Moreover, a viable and sustainable community based response to environmental and climatic challenges requires a critical mass of motivated, informed and concerted local actors. To make good headway in this direction, an arduous but dynamic process has been set into motion resulting in a growing commitment and capacity building among the local actors in the three EcoAdapt territories. The project's mini and synthesis workshops were building- and stepping-stones in a continuous path of joint learning and capacity development. In the former events the information captured in the base line study was discussed with the locals actors, while in the second ones, the interest aroused was capitalized upon to form the change agents groups (an essential aspect of the EcoAdapt strategy) and to respond to the demand of more precise and accessible information, by means of a series of field learning activities. This had some promising outcomes such as contributing to a common interest and growing understanding of water as a central watershed ecosystem; widening of the horizon and view towards watershed and landscape management; strengthening of community drinking water systems with regards to its hardware and software (physical infrastructure, local management and governance); growing cooperation among urban and rural groups or between civil society and policy makers around water issues; creating a link between the legal framework and policy making and the processes on