Benefits and challenges of working with a centrally designed project that is then locally co-produced

Designing the project centrally from the research institute has implications for the rest of the project and the local co-production processes. Given that this project was not requested by city officials, it cannot be said that it was co-designed. It was up to each local researcher or research team to find a suitable counterpart at the city administration and establish a working relationship and work plan that is as co-productive as possible. This also means that in cases where no prior working relations with relevant city officials existed, it was necessary to establish these from scratch, which took time. Setting this up was both facilitated and constrained by the centrally designed nature of the project. Given that the global agendas (Agenda 2030 and NUA) are comprehensive and multi-sectoral, they require a city partner with a sufficiently overarching view and access to the local authority. It is therefore not surprising that most teams have involved city officials at strategic and leading offices such as the planning office, city executive office, or even the head of the municipality itself in the smaller municipalities such as Shimla, where the main counterpart is the commissioner. In the case of Buenos Aires, the local team also involved a specialist human rights NGO. Building trust and a good work plan that suited the needs and interests of the city administration, the NGO and the university took time. The flexibility of the central project, both in terms of initial timeframes (while teams were forming) and content, allowed the local team to achieve good working relations with an agreed working agenda relevant to local needs and to the comparative project.

Using Agenda 2030, in particular, with its universal language and applicability, has helped to interest some municipalities in joining the project, particularly those that had already started working on Agenda 2030 or thought the project could help them getting started with the localisation process. Many cities were not yet working with the SDGs and NUA when the project started. In some, the project provided the impetus for cities to start exploring these agendas and how to implement them locally. In other cities, it made setting up the collaboration arrangements more difficult as officials were busy with other, more pressing issues. In Sheffield, for example, with the SDGs still relatively low-profile at the national level, the focus was on establishing a partnership that could support the local authority’s awareness of the SDGs and explore opportunities for engagement. Even in cities where the SDGs have been set as priority by politicians or city officials, such as in Malmö, those charged with working with the SDGs had to carve out their role with limited resources in sceptical or rigid city government environments. These struggles meant that the SDG teams had constantly to be attentive, sensitive and reactive to oppositional responses within the municipal organisation itself and had to focus their engagement to pre-prioritised processes, inadvertently causing inertia when it came to adaptability and quick-footedness in response to secondary or peripheral processes, such as this transdisciplinary research project.

International agendas like the SDGs and NUA are not automatically integrated into national and local policy everywhere. Our research suggests a disconnect between these tiers of government in the UK context, for example. Indeed, the UK experience suggests that where there has been local government engagement with the SDGs (for example in Bristol, Canterbury and Liverpool), this process has been stakeholder-led rather than top-down. Further, despite the project being conceived to cover the local adaptation of the whole Agenda 2030 and the NUA, in Buenos Aires it was necessary to adjust the scope of the research considering the limitations of the main city counterpart. Following the City office’s priorities, the team agreed to examine housing issues in depth, a topic that crosses several SDGs as it includes issues of equality, water, electricity and transport, for instance. This led the team to enhance collaboration with the housing institute and the project has facilitated cross-institutional collaboration, an issue with which most cities struggle. These examples highlight the necessity of a local co-production approach adapted to each city’s needs and national context.

A key ingredient of the project’s comparative element was the team’s monthly conference calls, which enabled the local researchers and team leaders to share experiences on the cities’ activities and also on methodological challenges and opportunities inherent in carrying out co-production with actors with different levels of awareness and engagement in the global agendas. However, this also meant that the international component of the project was carried out mostly by the researchers, apart from the face-to-face, cross-city sharing events and the city-to-city, peer-review process mentioned earlier. Given that the project embraced seven cities, involving the city staff in frequent virtual meetings would have been very difficult and hard to facilitate. A lesson learned is that if the intention is to have an international comparative project with both researchers and city staff involved throughout the whole process, a smaller number of cities is required. In a project with two to three cities, having regular virtual exchanges between the researcher–city staff teams of each city might be feasible, and a more horizontal and even distribution of responsibilities could be implemented.

At the same time, the international comparative aspect, with cities on four continents all working on global sustainability agendas, was seen by local authorities as an important incentive to being part of the project. Several teams of city officials and researchers highlighted that this made them feel part of a larger and strategic endeavour towards sustainable urban development, where they can contribute to global processes through initiatives in their local work. The variety of cities representing different contexts and starting points for global policy can represent a challenge for cross-city learning. Yet, project city teams underscored the benefits of learning from diverse contexts in various countries, cities, governance arrangements, institutional forms, and policy regimes. Learning across cities was facilitated by the centrally designed project, which provided a window to other approaches through a common framework (the project itself, but also Agenda 2030 and the NUA) for comparison and learning, as well as giving additional legitimacy, credibility and strength to the local work and Agenda 2030 itself. In Cape Town, for example, the engagement of the embedded researcher with actors external to the city on SDGs and NUA implementation was ongoing and greatly appreciated as a source of information and engagement. The sharing of lessons across cities facilitated by the project also offered an opportunity for cities to reflect on their own enterprises and strategies. Sharing of lessons took place not only through the face-to-face meetings in Cape Town and Sheffield and the peer-to-peer review but also through the information shared in the monthly research team virtual meetings, which was then passed on from local researchers to their respective city officials. In short, the project created valuable room for learning and self-reflection, for which there was otherwise very little time in city administrations. It also provided opportunities to position local sustainability work in a global context and strengthen international relationships with other cities.

Even so, it was challenging for some municipalities to understand the larger scenario in which the project activities and outcomes were situated. In other words, the project has had far-reaching and long-term outcomes, while local bodies mainly attend to various immediate local challenges. This occurred particularly in cities with limited devolution responsibilities, such as Shimla, where strategic decisions, such as short- to medium-term development plans, are often the responsibility of higher levels of government, in this case the state. In addition, one challenge of working with internationally agreed agendas and a centrally designed project was making the activities context-specific. The SDGs and NUA reflect the collective priorities of countries and urban areas as a whole, while challenges faced by individual cities are often context-specific, which may or may not tie in with the global priorities.

The fact that the project was centrally designed and administered, outside of the municipal organisation itself, was for several cities, such as Malmö and Sheffield, a prerequisite for participation. In several of the cities, there would have been no resources available for assuming a leading role in such an endeavour. In Cape Town, for example, having an embedded researcher who is paid by Mistra Urban Futures was seen as providing an additional resource for the city to work on Agenda 2030. The international comparison component of the project also mobilised knowledge and resources that would not have been achievable if the project had been a single-city, locally designed project. In Sheffield, for example, the team was able to contrast research findings about low local awareness of the SDGs with examples of how SDG awareness, engagement and localisation have been supported and enabled by national governments in partner cities/countries. Asking the same questions in each country and city enabled the team to realise just how poor the UK government’s response to the SDGs has been, and to use cross-national evidence to highlight this through the UK Voluntary National Report process. In Gothenburg, where there has been a limited political mandate regarding Agenda 2030 and where the 2018 elections significantly changed the political landscape and control of the elected city council, precipitating a period of uncertainty for the Agenda 2030 group at the city administration, the project helped provide stability and continuing legitimacy to its work. In Kisumu, in the context of clear national commitments to the SDGs, the project facilitated initiating collaboration and information sharing at the national, county and city levels and with other key stakeholders. As previously mentioned, as a result of the project, the Kenyan national office in charge of SDG implementation chose Kisumu to help it understand how the SDGs are being localised to the city level as a model for other urban areas to emulate.

The centrally designed project also allowed the cities some exposure to perspectives that might not have surfaced had the project been designed by the municipality itself. One vital example was the project’s focus on indicators as a core element of analysis. Several of the cities, for example Gothenburg, Malmö and Sheffield, had not initially identified indicators as a focus of their work. The flexibility of the project permitted cities to start the research–practitioner joint work in the areas of common interest. In the cases where the local authority’s interest did not match with the project’s originally proposed outcomes, it was the researchers’ role to complement the joint work to achieve those outcomes. However, in some cases, where data were not available for key indicators such as those under the urban SDG, this was not possible. Even where data were available, but a city had little interest in using the SDGs indicators, local teams recognised that the part of the project focused on indicators ran the risk of becoming an exercise in measuring for measuring’s sake rather than exploring more broadly the benefits and drawbacks of the SDGs as a framework for local sustainability planning. Attempting to accommodate these challenges, the project team tried to take a less rigid approach and allow city teams to adapt certain design choices along the way, accepting that the outcomes of the project would vary by city.

Even for cities where the interests of researchers and city officials coincided, institutional capacity could pose challenges in producing the expected outputs for the project, and even beyond the project, having the necessary capacity to meet the localised goals of these global agendas and to monitor progress towards those goals. In Kisumu, for example, data collection for monitoring and evaluation was considered a priority from the inception of the project and the UN-recommended indicators as a good starting point for identifying key data to monitor the three dimensions of sustainability. However, the local team found significant data gaps and a time-lag in updating some of the indicators. It also found a lack of statistical capacity at the city and county levels to compute some of the indicators. An additional challenge relating to indicators, and that applies to all countries, is that not all UN-recommended indicators yet have a defined methodology and thus countries have had to develop their own interpretations of indicators and methodologies while waiting for the globally suggested methods.

Another additional challenge arising from the central project design was that some research questions made assumptions about the existing level of engagement with the SDGs and NUA that did not necessarily reflect reality or local priorities. The NUA exemplified this in almost all cities. The project was designed soon after the NUA’s adoption in Quito in October 2016. There was an expectation by the UN that this agenda would resonate in cities and be implemented in parallel to Agenda 2030. However, none of our case study cities had engaged with the NUA by the end of 2019, making the framing of the project about both global agendas and the research questions related to the NUA almost redundant, except that this represents a significant finding in its own right.

A minor potential exception is Buenos Aires, which subscribes to the NUA in a declarative way. Yet, the city administration does not use it as a reference either to review its governmental goals or to assess its results. Since this agenda does not provide interpretative or implementational instruments, it becomes, through the vision of the city team in charge of international commitments, a declaration of interest more than a tool for public management. Indeed, UN-Habitat issued national government reporting guidelines on implementation of the NUA only in June 2019 (UN-Habitat, 2019).

Benefits and challenges of the local co-production process

The researcher–city official knowledge co-production partnerships that were established in each of the project cities had many benefits and distinct results, but they were not devoid of challenges. First, for many city official partners, the concept of knowledge co-production was new, and the project was their first experience of engaging in such an endeavour, as in the case of Shimla. In cities such as Cape Town, where there was already an established knowledge transfer programme between the City and University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities (see Chapter Four), establishing the co-production partnership was easier and the project contributed to building additional trust and working partnerships that were quickly seen as mutually beneficial. In Kisumu and Gothenburg, cities that also had established collaborations between Mistra Urban Futures’ researchers and city administrations, one challenge was the limited local political momentum and budget allocation. Similarly, in a city like Sheffield, where there has been low awareness of the SDGs and no staff or budget allocated to working on Agenda 2030, much of the co-production process was taken up with simply getting a pilot project off the ground.

In several cities, the research team gained access to internal city meetings to discuss the SDGs. This occurred in Gothenburg, where the researcher joined the monthly SDG team meetings at the City Executive Office. This type of access to internal meetings helped maintain frequent contact between the researcher and city officials, as well as access to information and discussions that provided extra insights into why certain things move more quickly than others. It also helped researchers gain a better understanding of how the city administration operates, which includes the opportunities and challenges faced by city officials to act on particular subjects, and their relationships with politicians. The extent to which researchers were able to contribute to internal processes (such as writing or reviewing relevant reports) varied significantly by city, reflecting the different traditions of collaboration between local government and academia and the importance of making international co-production projects flexible in order to adapt the process to the different contexts.

Knowledge co-production and, more generally, undertaking collaborations between different institutions can be challenging. On the one hand, the different institutional arrangements between the partners, reflected in the way the city administrations operate vis-à-vis research institutes and NGOs, can slow the pace of work and require recurrent discussions about the expectations of the collaboration, and the different roles and timeframes. On the other hand, the diverse institutional settings and capacities of the partners involved can also be complementary, which gives the opportunity, particularly for the researchers, to find issues or tasks related to the project that are also seen as beneficial for the local government.

Given the novelty of Agenda 2030 for several of the municipalities at the inception of the project, the local co-production process also included building awareness and capacity within local government, not only of the Agenda itself but also in some cities of goal-based planning. In cities with limited engagement with Agenda 2030, the co-production process gave local authorities additional capacity to think through and start working on the Agenda, while sharing experiences with other cities. Even cities with the reputation of being forerunners in the pursuit of urban sustainability and Agenda 2030, such as Malmö, gained the twin benefits of being considered a contributor to global efforts for localisation of the SDGs, while also becoming both a source and a recipient of knowledge through the local and international co-production processes. This can provide substantial value to the work of the city and the engagement of officials in the knowledge co-production. The raised awareness and additional capacity resulting from the co-production process helped highlight to city officials the importance of universities and other research-focused organisations as anchor institutions for local sustainability planning. This therefore represents a particular variant of the value of city–university partnerships, a subject of considerable current interest (Trencher et al, 2014b, 2014a; Allen et al, 2017; Withycombe Keeler et al, 2018, 2019). Yet, in some cities such as in Malmö and Sheffield, the project period was too short for co-production to emerge not only as an opportunity but also as a practice within the project.

One challenge in most cities was data collection. In the larger cities, such as Buenos Aires, the city administration has several offices involved in the evaluation and monitoring of the SDGs. The positive side is that the city has the capacity to generate its own information, and it has a centralised office, SGEyCI, in charge of the SDG localisation. These characteristics allowed the research team access to official information and to the main department related to the implementation of the Agenda 2030. However, it was challenging to access some specific data produced by other departments. In smaller cities, the challenge was the limited availability of disaggregated city-level data that are reliable and collected regularly.

Another aspect on which all researchers reflected was their positionality, particularly in the cities with limited engagement with these agendas. The co-production process included having to raise awareness of the SDGs and how they might be useful in persuading local partners to undertake the project with the researchers; there is a risk that researchers end up coming across like advocates or SDG consultants rather than critical scientists. In Sheffield, for example, the membership of the research team in the UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development and the co-organisation of a workshop on localising the SDGs exemplified its ambiguous ‘research-as-advocacy’ role. It was important for all the research teams to make clear to their city partners that they were not there to ‘sell’ the SDGs, and they were free to be critical or sceptical of the framework as well as to explore jointly its possible benefits. Similarly, a challenge was how to critically (co-)write about the city and the way it operates without jeopardising established relationships.