CAUCE Resilience Partners. Channeling knowledge. Aligning systems. Advancing resilience.
CAUCE researches how policies, institutions, responsibilities, evidence, and coordination shape climate and resilience action. We identify gaps and implementation barriers and turn complex evidence into clear findings, reports, and practical recommendations.
Selected proof from Francine Conti’s professional and research work—not CAUCE client results.
Co-authored the governance chapter of CDRI’s Global Infrastructure Resilience Report.
Led expert interviews with leaders from multilateral institutions, government agencies, and private operators.
Researched cases across countries and sectors and translated evidence into findings and recommendations.
Experience producing reports, memos, briefings, dashboards, and implementation tracking for complex environmental and resilience work.
What we do
CAUCE helps organizations investigate complex climate and resilience questions, understand how policies and institutions work in practice, identify gaps and barriers, and turn the evidence into clear outputs that support decisions and implementation.
Understand the issue and build the evidence base.
Policy and plan reviews, literature and evidence synthesis, stakeholder or expert interviews, comparative case studies, gap analysis, and clear written findings.
Typical outputs
Research briefs · policy analyses · case studies · interview findings · reports · recommendations
Understand how the system is supposed to work—and where the gaps are.
Analyze institutions, mandates, actors, responsibilities, relationships, decision pathways, dependencies, coordination gaps, and barriers between plans and implementation.
Typical outputs
Actor and responsibility maps · implementation-gap analysis · governance findings · decision and dependency maps · recommendations
Keep responsibilities, requirements, decisions, and follow-up visible.
Support teams by organizing requirements, responsibilities, decisions, documentation, deadlines, dependencies, deliverables, and partner follow-up as work moves forward.
Typical outputs
Trackers · decision logs · responsibility matrices · status summaries · meeting follow-up · implementation documentation
Issues we research and work across
Adaptation policy, climate risk, vulnerability, resilience planning, and the gap between plans and implementation.
Preparedness, risk reduction, recovery, institutional coordination, and lessons from disaster-resilience practice.
Research on extreme heat and other climate hazards, health protections, displacement, migration, relocation, and the institutions shaping responses.
Nature-based solutions, ecosystem restoration, wetlands, coastal adaptation, ocean resilience, and governance of natural systems.
Local climate action, institutional capacity, coordination, community-level resilience, and implementation in cities and places.
Applied research, policy analysis, and evidence synthesis related to energy transition and decarbonization.
Systems lens
Climate and resilience challenges are shaped by less-visible systems: policies, institutions, mandates, responsibilities, evidence, relationships, capacity, decisions, and dependencies. CAUCE researches those layers so clients can understand what is happening, where the gaps are, and what the evidence suggests should happen next.
Visible challenge
A policy is not producing the expected results, implementation is uneven, responsibilities are unclear, evidence is fragmented, or a resilience priority is difficult to move.
Invisible system
Policies, institutions, mandates, responsibilities, relationships, evidence, capacity, decision pathways, dependencies, funding conditions, and other implementation mechanisms.
Research & analysis
Review policies and plans, synthesize evidence, map actors and responsibilities, interview relevant people, compare cases, and identify gaps, barriers, and recurring patterns.
Practical output
A clear evidence base: policy or implementation analysis, maps, case studies, findings, reports, recommendations, and—when useful—coordination tools for follow-through.
A worked example
The policy sets commitments, but progress differs across agencies, programs, or locations and it is not clear why.
Mandates, responsibilities, institutional relationships, evidence, capacity, coordination, and implementation mechanisms may not line up with the policy’s intent.
Review the policy and related documents, map responsibilities, interview relevant actors, compare implementation with other jurisdictions, and identify evidence-based gaps.
A policy and implementation-gap analysis, actor/responsibility map, comparative evidence, findings report, and practical recommendations.
Selected experience
Selected examples from Francine Conti’s professional and research experience. These are not presented as CAUCE client engagements.
Co-authored the governance chapter, analyzing how policies, institutions, financing arrangements, and coordination structures shape resilience, preparedness, response, and recovery; developed 12+ comparative case studies and recommendations.
Independently secured and coordinated interviews with leaders from multilateral institutions, government agencies, and private operators—including the World Bank—and synthesized qualitative evidence into report findings.
Led regional agency coordination supporting a systemwide wildfire-risk reduction program, tracking requirements and approvals across California jurisdictions and maintaining clear follow-up across teams.
Supported a major habitat-restoration and climate-adaptation initiative by coordinating mitigation commitments, decisions, reporting requirements, documentation, and agency follow-up.
Synthesized scientific, policy, regulatory, and technical information into assessments, memoranda, dashboards, briefings, and stakeholder-facing materials for decision-makers.
Managed research workflows, stakeholder follow-up, deliverables, and review cycles while contributing to a framework mapping the roles of public institutions, private actors, and civil society in resilience.
About CAUCE
Francine is a climate resilience and policy professional whose work combines applied research, governance analysis, technical writing, stakeholder interviews, and multi-agency coordination. She co-authored the governance chapter of CDRI’s 2025 Global Infrastructure Resilience Report and previously supported complex environmental and resilience work in consulting. She holds an M.S. in Environment and International Affairs from Georgetown University and works across English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Focus: climate resilience · adaptation · governance · policy research · implementation analysis · evidence synthesis
Start with evidence: policies, plans, literature, data, interviews, and comparable cases.
Clarify the institutions, responsibilities, relationships, decisions, and dependencies shaping the issue.
Turn complex findings into clear reports, maps, recommendations, and practical tools people can use.
Insights
Coming soon. CAUCE will publish evidence-based pieces on why climate and resilience policies succeed or stall, what comparative cases can teach us, and how institutions and implementation shape outcomes.
Implementation gaps in climate policy · governance lessons from resilience cases · adaptation, heat, mobility, and nature-based resilience
Work with CAUCE
Share the question, project, policy, or implementation challenge you are working on. CAUCE will respond about fit and the most useful next step.
hello@cauceresilience.comTell us briefly what you need to understand, assess, or move forward.
