Collaboratories for science to urban policy
Published by the Canadian Science Policy Centre | 2021 Conference Editorials | November 2021
Authors: Yan Kestens, Marie-Christine Therrien, Joris Arnaud, Zoé Poirier Stephens
Cities are at the forefront of key societal and environmental dynamics. They are both the sites in which global dynamics play out, such as climate change and health crises; and key actors in addressing these major global issues and ‘wicked problems’. As theaters of social dynamics and conflicts, cities and its residents have a key role to play. In a permanent state of transformation, cities are the perfect setting to catalyse advances, benefiting from the perspectives of diversity, expertise, and innovation.
By definition, solutions to ‘wicked problems’ are not simple. From that perspective, there has been a growing recognition that sustainable and resilient city solutions require a complex system approach, that is, solutions which consider the numerous interactions and feedback loops that a city-system encompasses. This requires transdisciplinary thinking, diversity, inclusion, and multisectoral action, a departure from a world that has until now traditionally favored the favored, with the consequences we know and share.
While science has increasingly contributed to documenting and understanding the major challenges we face, as illustrated by the massive collaborative work on climate change or the phenomenal mobilization to understand and fight the COVID-19 epidemic, we are far from a situation that optimises the possible synergy between science and action. A focus on solving society’s wicked problems like tackling climate change, addressing inequities, and proposing new logics of production/consumption that support these goals should be among our top priorities, driven by community input.
Why aren’t scientists and urban practitioners not better at synching up? One reason may be the relative ‘disconnect’ between the logics of scientific production on one hand, mostly driven by internal academic structures that govern access to research funding and career promotion, and on the other, the needs faced by our society.
Peer-reviewed production grows exponentially, each paper contributing only marginally to knowledge production and making it difficult to leverage evidence for practical applications or interventions. Most systematic reviews bemoan a lack of longitudinal, intervention-based research, observing that most of the evidence produced is of cross-sectional nature, revealing little about causal processes, and offering poor indications for concrete action and public policy adjustment.
Meanwhile, decision-making in cities and planning of urban systems are confronted by their own inherent limitations, from lack of funding to local governance struggles, an area for which solid evidence on what works is lacking. The citizens and communities that make up our cities are often left out of the decision-making process. Fundamentally, city strategic planning and urban interventions only partly rely on adequate evidence and community input, and rarely adopt validated processes, limiting our ability to tackle wicked problems that need addressing.
In other words, to improve the linkage between science and urban policy, changes are required in how science is produced, urban policy is made, and how they both interact.
For this to happen, we need to start strengthening interdisciplinary training, integrating scientific expertise in municipal governance and action, training academics in policy cycles and realities, and teaming up with knowledge brokers. While all these can contribute to building stronger links, we believe boundary structures are needed to pave the way towards better collaborations to respond to urban challenges with a science to policy approach. One example of a boundary structure are dedicated collaboratories. These settings help academics co-construct and co-conduct research endeavours with municipal partners, ensuring relevance, both for institutions and communities. Such an effort was recently launched in Québec, Canada, where the Chief Scientific Officer jump-started the Uni-Cité Collaboratory, bringing together two labs with expertise in municipal governance and urban health, with the mission to help bridge the gap between science and urban policy. To achieve this, Uni-Cité (https://www.uni-cite.ca/) generates guidelines, tools and methods to help the scientific and municipal communities come together. They also directly support and collaborate with research and intervention projects that involve both municipalities and researchers. By guiding, observing, and learning from the process, Uni-Cité identifies what actually works when implementing change.
Researchers’ strengths mainly lie in their mastery of concepts, theories and methods helping to grasp complexity, make sense of our world, and imagine and design new ways. Scientific debates are rarely simple and straightforward: acknowledging unintended consequences and putting opposing and evolving views into perspective are also core to the scientific approach. Meanwhile, cities as sites of action and transformation have no choice but to experiment with this complexity head on. Strengthening the links between science and urban policy will help to observe, reflect, and reveal a world of possibilities.
Yan Kestens and Marie-Christine Therrien co-lead the Collaboratory Uni-Cité, which promotes and optimizes the links between science and policy, through action research with cities and creates resources to support future collaborations. More on Uni-Cité at www.uni-cite.ca