“Ecology with cities” projects require an understanding that city administrations are not homogenous. Within city administrations, competition exists for how to use scarce land resources, with green departments arguing for conservation and biodiversity outcomes, while other departments argue for development of built infrastructure. Ecological research provides green departments with ‘ammunition’ in these disputes. One respondent from a city administration pointed out, “We try to convince other parts of the administration, citizens, or businesses of our opinion on what we consider the best solution for the given problem, using scientific results as a support for our arguments”. The participating researchers appear to be well aware of this position and often point out, as one respondent did, the need “for a city to understand how green and open spaces function from an environmental and ecological perspective” so that the researchers can provide “important, evidence-based arguments for a city” to use. Researchers expressed the need for implementation measures to be communicated so that the people understand and accept them. In this way, the goals of the city green departments and the goals of the researchers strongly overlap, but both city administrations and researchers acknowledged the difficulty of creating a “link between theory and reality”, and point out that it is “challenging to boil down the results for practical implementation”. However, awareness of the overlapping goals leads researchers to place importance on the research remaining practically relevant, with the implicit expectation, or rather hope, that city administrations might implement the scientific results.
The goals for collaboration can be seen as the usefulness of ecology-based research to inform city administrations and aid in decision making so that ecology may indeed be translational (Enquist et al., 2017). Representatives of city administrations see it as their job to make the best possible decisions to encourage biodiversity within the constraints of citizens’ needs, legal requirements, and scarce resources. The respondents from green departments expressed the opinion that science and data provide the basis for their daily work and reported that they use scientific results to orient, and sometimes reorient, projects and strategies. Scientific results can also be used to give legitimacy to management and resource-allocation decisions by explaining the scientific basis for the decisions to stakeholders. Researchers similarly see the value of supporting decision-making by providing relevant scientific results, such as alerting city administrations to “burning issues”, or providing technical solutions for specific cases, such as methods for carbon sequestration. One researcher, for example, claimed they provide “scientific arguments as a basis for management and planning decisions”. However, another pointed out that “an administration which wants as little disruption as possible - perhaps for legitimate reasons - has less to gain” from translational ecology: a result that would probably not be surprising to Hallet et al. (2017). Researchers take the general position that city administrations should take more time to innovate and apply research results that ultimately achieve a greater benefit for the public, although this position ignores the cities’ institutional boundaries and limitations (Hallet et al., 2017). For example, a Swiss municipality is legally obliged to undertake expensive remedial actions if traces of heavy metals in soils are found to exceed prescribed limits, which are lower for green spaces than for sealed areas. In some cases, discovery of heavy metals in soil that only exceed the limits by a small amount can force the removal of a greenspace for economic reasons, which is in contrast to the goals of green departments.
In an effort to align goals and to understand institutional boundaries and limitations, responding researchers claimed to seek dialogue with city administrations early in the research design phase of a project and point out the mutual benefits of collaboration. City administrations “can hear the state of the art at national and international level and scientists can better understand the needs of the administration and try to integrate them into their research”. However, one respondent from a city administration observed that the administrations “know more about what is going on in science (in terms of study results) than the scientists know what is being put into practice and where the relevant questions are”. This discrepancy probably reflects a divergence in the performance evaluation criteria between employees of cities and research institutes, with both institutions subject to institutional boundaries and limitations (Hallet et al., 2017). While city administrations are interested in results that lead to practical applications, researchers are bound by the need to follow the principles of good experimental design and to satisfy funding bodies with their scientific, rather than practical, output. In this case, adjustment of research methodologies for purposes of good collaboration are limited by the imperative to maintain fidelity to scientific rigour.
These issues notwithstanding, there are practical reasons for collaboration. Researchers expressed the wish to access city resources, such as maps, databases, local knowledge, and networks. Furthermore, it was considered an act of courtesy to inform city green departments when a scientific study was being undertaken within an administrative district, especially when data were being collected in public spaces. As one researcher noted, “To gain access to services or actors is important for my research. Here the administrations have a gatekeeper function”. City administrations also have practical reasons for collaboration in that they can access other competences, such as in methodologies and analysis, that they might otherwise not have the resources to engage. One respondent from a green department commented: “We depend on research results to get our work done in the right place, with the right priorities and objectives” but to do that, “cooperation must be very close… we need data, scientific advice, [and] background information [from] studies that we can't do by ourselves”.
Tensions in collaboration
Both researchers and city administrators were generally positive about previous experiences of cooperation and used terms such as “constructive”, “respectful”, and “motivating”. However, when interpreting this result, we should remember that people for whom collaboration was unfruitful or annoying, or just did not take place, were not asked for their opinion so we are limited in our ability to comment on how such unwillingness to collaborate by city officials could be overcome. The respondents in this survey were those with whom we have experience collaborating, and who we knew to be open to collaboration between city administrations and researchers, so it is not surprising that the attitudes were generally positive. Tobias et al. (2019) similarly found that experience with collaboration tends to lead to more positive attitudes towards transdisciplinary principles and to a higher likelihood of collaboration in the future. However, even within this group of colleagues with a history of working together, some differences in the working worlds were identified and there appear to be insufficient mutual understandings of the constraints they each face.
Some difficulties were noted, politely expressed as “different perspectives”, on issues and topics that made cooperation “exciting”. Stokols et al. (2008) point out that contextual differences are inherent in transdisciplinary scientific collaboration, with the degree of contextual influence correlating with the degree of diversity of the perspectives held by the collaborators. In the experiences of respondents, these different perspectives sometimes led to confrontation, which in turn led to a need to “take the time to reflect with others about our practices”. Among the sources of tension were the indicators used to demonstrate success, which are different between the collaborating institutions. A key indicator of success in scientific institutions is the number of scientific publications resulting from a project rather than the degree to which the recommendations have been implemented or whether recommendations are practical. However, some voices in Swiss academic circles propose that practical implementation should carry more weight in the evaluation of scientific projects (Arlettaz et al., 2010) but it is unlikely that either type of institution can change their evaluation criteria, at least in the short term. On the other hand, success in a city green department is measured by the participation and acceptance of interventions, along with the practicality of implementation and the ecological outcomes. Stokols et al. (2008) suggest that collaboration under conditions of such widely divergent institutional contexts will inevitably lead to conflict and tensions unless members of a collaboration establish familiarity with each other’s way of thinking, such as through the prolonged and regular exchange of ideas and the establishment of structures to create “collaboration readiness” (pp. 105).
Ecological research in cities takes time, and city administrations commonly need the results in a considerably shorter time-period than is practical for researchers, as emphasized by one respondent: “We often need quick and specific answers and can’t always wait for final results”. Representatives of city administrations often perceive researchers as service providers for the public because they are often, either directly or indirectly, financed by taxpayers' money. Researchers, on the other hand, would like to see their recommendations implemented with city resources that might simply not be available. Translational ecologists working in cities often recommend that city green departments should “put much more resources in a peculiar project, [but] it is not always possible” and the scarcity of resources means that there is “too little integration of scientific results”. These differences can lead to frustration on both sides and a feeling on the side of researchers that city administrations are “not really interested in science“. City representatives point out: “we have too much work with our daily business and only little time for innovation”. Researchers complain that it sometimes needs a long time before cities answer and that it “looks like they are overwhelmed by other work, [with] not much time to consider also outcomes from science”. This, however, reflects a common misunderstanding about what is actually feasible and implementable by public administrations (Harris, 2012), with researchers often failing to understand that city administrations also face, sometimes severe, limitations in time, financial, and spatial resources.
Relieving tensions with mutual understanding
Among the stated motivations for finding common ground was that goals are often shared by individuals with similar interests. City green departments see researchers as a potential resource in their competition for land uses and expressed the opinion that science and data provide the basis for their daily work by orienting, and sometimes reorienting, projects and strategies. Scientific results can also be used to give legitimacy to management and resource-allocation decisions by explaining the scientific basis for the decisions to stakeholders. On the other hand, researchers, at a personal level, want to see their research results implemented in practice, which is not usually a measure of academic success, and there are rarely academic resources for implementation of ecological projects. Researchers are therefore reliant on others to implement the results, and cities are a good candidate.
Schneider and Buser (2018) suggest that methodologies for defining research-related key questions, communicating different views and time frames, and creating common understandings should be negotiated between the participants: in this case, researchers and city administrations, at the beginning of a project when interaction and cooperation should be particularly close. This was reported to be seldom the case in reality, with many collaborations going ahead with few efforts made to structure mutual learning in a way that can enable both groups of participants to really understand the needs and constraints of the other. The clear remedy to this is to commit resources to establishing such structures early in a collaboration so that the common goals and different skill sets that each party can bring can be recognised and discussed. A further benefit of the early negotiation of processes and structures to enable common understanding is that it will facilitate recognition of the differing constraints faced by collaborators from different institutional settings with different institutional boundaries and limitations, such as time scales and financial resources, pointed out by Hallet et al. (2017) before misunderstandings become entrenched.