While climate change impacts are already evident in the remote island communities of the Torres Strait, they are unfolding against the much more rapid change caused by population growth, rising cost of living, cultural change, and health, biosecurity and transboundary issues. Participatory adaptation planning seeks to broaden multiple stakeholders’ mental models to better understand this complex web of drivers and possible adaptation options to increase island communities’ resilience. Among those who facilitate these processes, however, a more nuanced awareness is needed of our own ‘knowledge cultures’ when supporting change processes, along with evaluation of the planning process and our roles within it. In this presentation we consider this from our experience in a four-year collaboration in the Torres Strait, particularly: What methods are appropriate to catalyse and operationalise the theory and practice of adaptation science? What roles do we as scientists, managers and decision-makers play, and how do we assess them? We combined an adaptive co-management framework with a ‘theory of change’ to structure interviews with project team members and stakeholders at the conclusion of the project to assess evidence of three phases of change: preparing the system for change, seizing a window of opportunity, and building social-ecological resilience. Greatest progress was achieved in preparing the system for change, but the effects of the process on building resilience are largely yet to emerge. We discuss tensions that arose in our attempts to integrate knowledge cultures, and remark on how this integration, while challenging, can contribute to learning and transformation.