It is also important to note that researchers should not expect everyone in communities to welcome the proposed work or be interested in engaging, however participatory the process attempts to be. With regards to this latter point, some student participants noted significant anxiety during their fieldwork—despite following guidelines for community engagement—as local interest in being engaged was limited; indeed, the literature, with its overemphasis on success stories and sanitized descriptions of methodology, had not prepared many students for the on‐the‐ground realities of community research. Beyond practical challenges of doing participatory research in the North—time commitment, expense, language differences, and institutional recognition and support (e.g., see Refs 34, 39, 40, 95, 96)—the nature of CBA can also bring tensions to researcher‐community relations, including: Tensions over process: Given the in‐depth nature of community engagement in CBA, there is the potential for community resistance to certain components of research. Workshop participants, e.g., described how communities viewed evaluation of pilot adaptations as intrusive and distracting despite recognition by local leaders and institutions of the importance of such metrics. Accommodating these concerns often involves scaling‐down the depth and frequency of the evaluation process and tools (e.g., fewer interviews, no large community surveys), which may potentially compromise the ability to generate results of sufficient rigor to assist communities in their efforts to obtain funding to continue pilot interventions or to scale up pilot projects into regular programs. There is also a tension between recognizing the importance of considering future risks, while still understanding that there are more pressing day‐to‐day issues that may take precedence. This is further complicated by the fact that, for some Inuit, there is a strong hesitancy to speak about the future due to a belief in the sentience of the natural world, acknowledgment of variation and the transient nature of environmental knowledge, and cultural resistance to focusing on the negative.38 Consequently, few of the adaptation projects that workshop participants were engaged in had a strong future focus, despite this being recognized as a key contribution researchers can bring to community adaptation. A similar observation has been made in the general CBA literature where the factoring of future climate risks into CBA has remained limited, and even discouraged by some for fears that such consideration may lead to overemphasis on future‐orientated technological responses.32, 97, 98 Maintaining a climate change/adaptation focus: Despite the fact that the Arctic is witnessing the most dramatic climate change globally, communities are not always interested in climate change‐focused projects, with more pressing issues often requiring attention.99 Consequently, some workshop participants felt like they were almost pushing adaptation onto communities in their work. There was acknowledgement that maintaining an adaptation focus can be challenging given the participatory nature of CBA projects, in which communities can steer attention to other issues that may be more pressing at the current time (e.g., Ref 100).