Witinok-Huber and colleagues ask a difficult question that co-production discourse often postpones: what capacities are actually altered by collaborative knowledge processes, and how might those changes be evaluated? Their “Wheel” framework connects knowledge co-production to adaptive capacity through measurable dimensions including socio-cognitive gain, social capital and trust, resource access, process design, outcomes, and—significantly—identity and relationality. That last addition expands evaluation beyond instrumental indicators by recognising that adaptation is also structured through histories, attachments, worldviews and relations with human and non-human environments. Methodologically, the paper integrates previously separated literatures, identifies conflicts and conceptual gaps, constructs common ground and translates the synthesis into indicators that can be adapted to different contexts. It therefore treats evaluation not as post-hoc verification but as a reflexive architecture capable of reshaping the research process itself. The work bridges climate adaptation, transdisciplinary methodology and relational epistemology, giving empirical traction to questions of whether collaborative research genuinely produces new collective capacities.