Environment and Planning A 2006, volume 38, pages 517 ^ 531
DOI:10.1068/a37393
Lost in translation? Exploring the interface between local environmental research and policymaking James P Evans
School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, England; e-mail:
[email protected] Received 6 November 2004; in revised form 16 December 2004
Abstract. In this paper I interrogate the relationship between environmental science and local governance in the United Kingdom. Effectively linking science and policy is critical to sustainable planning, and within the rhetoric of evidence-based policy it is often assumed that science conducted in a locality will feed linearly into the governance of that locality. This assumption is unpacked through the detailed study of an end-user-oriented environmental research project. I argue that the reproduction of separate scientific and political spheres prevented the research from being relevant to the governance of that locality. Theoretical and practical approaches to the spatialities of the research ^ policy interface are considered in order to politically reconstruct the local as a meaningful field of environmental governance.
Introduction The need to establish closer links between scientists and policymakers has long been acknowledged (Snow, 1964), and within contemporary discourses of sustainability the notion of evidence-based policy is increasingly influential as the means to this end (Cabinet Office, 1999; DEFRA, 2003; DETR, 1999). Accordingly, a shift has been identified towards scientific knowledge produced in the context of application (Gibbons et al, 1994; Lekakis, 2000; Ziman et al, 1994), and a series of funding streams have come online in the United Kingdom that explicitly aim to generate end-user-oriented research. However, these schemes tend to conceive of knowledge translation as an unproblematic process of `transfer', as if the knowledge itself were some kind of discrete package to be moved from science to policy (van der Sluijs et al, 1998). For example, in the application guidelines for the Higher Education Funding Council for England's (HEFCE's) Higher Education Reach-out to Business and the Community fund it is stated that ``we are concerned to encourage and reward ... the transfer of knowledge and expertise'' (HEFCE, 2000). The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Rural Economy and Land Use programme states `knowledge transfer' as one of its three objectives (ESRC, 2003), while the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Towards a Sustainable Energy Economy programme has a commitment ``to undertake rigorous, evidence-based analysis'' (EPSRC, 2004). Such linear models of science feeding into policy have been criticised as overly simplistic in neglecting ``the actively constructed character of science in policy'' (van der Sluijs et al, 1998, page 294), and the messiness of real world interactions between people and organisations (Davoudi, 2000a; Jasanoff, 1987). This critique has become evident in the domain of environmental science, where the study of complex physical systems precludes conventional opportunities for experimental control, generating high levels of uncertainty and place specificity. Indecision amongst scientists regarding high-profile environmental crises such as BSE and global warming have highlighted the social and political aspects of environmental research and policymaking (Hinchliffe, 2001; Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998; Shackley and Wynne, 1995). Equally, the imposition of environmental research conducted elsewhere upon
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specific localities as, for example, in the case of radionucleotides (Wynne, 1996) and agrienvironment schemes (Murdoch and Clark, 1994), has highlighted place-based resistance. In this paper I explore the intersection of environmental science and local policymaking through a detailed case study of an end-user-oriented research project. The biodiversity in urban habitat patches (hereafter BUHP) project was part of the Natural and Environmental Research Council (NERC) funded Urban Regeneration and the Environment (URGENT) programme that ran from 1997 to 2004, and aimed to inform strategic planning policy with cutting-edge ecological research conducted in the city of Birmingham, UK. I explore the differing epistemological and organisational contexts of the scientists and policymakers, and how these generated a specifically local dislocation between them. However, before moving on to the case study, it is useful to briefly consider the theoretical framework of local translation. Interpreting local translation Funding bodies are highly cognisant of the need to link the research they fund with networks of governance, but the acceptance of new science depends increasingly upon its fit with local governing networks (Cowell, 2003; Gibbs et al, 2002; Jessop, 2000; MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999). This task increasingly involves a ``highly complicated arrangement between formal organs of government at global, multi-national, national and sub-national levels ... and an increasing range of quasi-formal governing arrangements'' (O'Riordan, 2004, pages 234 ^ 235). Whereas it is generally considered to be important to unravel why planners make the decisions they do (Counsell, 1999; Davoudi, 2000b; Selman, 2002), the influence of locally produced science on their decisions has been relatively neglected. This is perhaps because there is a tacit assumption within the scientific method that, because environmental science tends to extrapolate from results on a trial area, science conducted in a locality will automatically be of relevance to the governance of that locality. The assumption of local relevance is also embodied in policy rhetoric, with Planning Policy Statement 1 urging local planning authorities to ``address, on the basis of sound science, the causes and impacts of climate change, pollution and waste and resource management impacts, for example through design'' ODPM (2004a, page 11). Although ``the drive for `new localism' in the UK ... carries with it enormous scope for sophisticated analysis of changing arrangements of multi-level governance'' (O'Riordan, 2004, page 235), this task is complicated as disjunctures between new knowledges and existing modalities of governance preclude simplistic notions of knowledge transfer. It is perhaps for this reason O'Riordan concludes that, ``despite a huge literature on sustainability and community, there is yet to be developed a process of research and policy coordination'' (O'Riordan, 2004, page 245). Although scientists and policymakers both generate `expert' knowledge (Petts and Brooks, 2006), the ``practices of creating and warranting knowledge in different domains'' (Knorr Cetina, 1999, page 246) demand that the process of translating knowledge involves more than just communication. Latour (1987) has suggested that translation entails a more engaged process of rolling out scientific results from a specific place and time through the enrolment of actors (conceived broadly as things or people) into networks supporting these specific knowledge claims, whereby, ``Actors gain power and interest by translating the interests of other entities into their own and thereby enrolling others in their actor world. The concept of translation recognizes that the content of texts, conversations, objects and so forth is not simply transferred unchanged between actors, but may be transformed as things pass from hand to hand'' (Burgess et al, 2000, page 5, italics added by author for emphasis).
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In terms of the case-study project, the expert knowledge of those involved concern the same thingöthe nature of Birminghamöbut are constructed in different networks that operate to different rhythms and in different spaces (Brooks, 2004). It is out of these contexts that the ``categorical distinctions that fundamentally shape the world (such as `science' and `policy') come themselves to be constructed and reproduced'' (van der Sluijs et al, 1998, page 295). The reproduction of these categories creates what Latour calls a `separation of powers' (1993; 2004, page 91) between science (fact) and politics (value), and is a critical schism upon which the notion of evidencebased policy rests. The reproduction of these divisions makes the transformation (rather than transfer) of knowledge inevitable: the question is how to manage this transformation (Gieryn, 1983; Shackley and Wynne, 1996). Within this analytic, the local does not disappear, but, like the categories of science and policy, is understood as a negotiable outcome of relations between actors at various levels (Massey, 2004). This approach to the local resonates with work in political ecology which suggests that, while the local scale is widely and pejoratively invoked in policy as inherently `relevant' and `joined-up' (Bebbington, 2000), it may actually obscure multilevel processes and associated arenas of contestation in practice (Brown and Purcell, 2002; Evans, 2004b; Zimmerer, 2000a). In this paper I explore the relation between the `separation of powers' and the construction of the local to interrogate how hegemonic local governance relations may actually constitute a form of boundary work between science and policy. Analysis draws upon a combination of primary and secondary data sources collected between 1998 and 2004. The core of the material is drawn from semiformal interviews (Gillham, 2000) conducted with members of the BUHP project steering group and the URGENT programme at different stages of the project. Key contacts from the Wildlife Trust and the University of Birmingham had been made over the course of related PhD research, and were known on a personal basis. The relationship with planners was more professional, and most of their comments were made off-therecord. This was not a serious problem, as in this paper I use the BUHP project to explore how science and policy are entwined in ways that are not determined by either science or policy, rather than as a specific (and potentially contentious) example of interorganisational relations. The primary data is contextualised by documentary analysis of written materials from NERC, URGENT, and the BUHP project itself, as well as attendance at the URGENT annual meetings in 2000 and 2001 and the related ESRC Transdisciplinary Seminar Series that ran from 2003 to 2004. Various field visits were also made to BUHP study sites with researchers over the course of the research period. The case-study project The BUHP project can be seen as a product of local and national contexts. Situated in Birmingham, the United Kingdom's second city, it assembled scientists (ecologists and biogeographers), and policymakers (planners, and nongovermental and think-tank members), in order to produce academically rigorous ecological knowledge to inform local planning policies and decisionmaking. However, the BUHP project also reflected wider currents in environmental policy and scientific funding in the United Kingdom, forming part of the national, government-funded URGENT research programme, which received »9.7 million of government funding to stimulate interdisciplinary, end-user relevant research upon urban environments between 1998 and 2005 (NERC, 2003). The programme emphasised ``links with the needs of decision-makers and ... designated `users' who follow the research closely and have a direct interest in the findings'' (URGENT, 2000, page iii).
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Sir Geoffrey Allen, chair of URGENT and former head of research for ICI and Unilever, stated that, ``establishing a scientific basis for sustainable development is terribly important for future planning'' (URGENT annual meeting, 4 April 2001), echoing the aim of its funding body, NERC, ``to provide objective independent expert scientific advice and information'' to policymakers (NERC, 2000). URGENT embraced the need for communication, repeatedly emphasising the need ``to listen carefully to planners, regulators, industrialists, conservation interests. And to express results in readily understandable terms'' (2000, page xi). As well as reproducing the linear rhetoric of evidence-based policy, there is another assumption going on here concerning the abstraction of results from the local and specific to the national and general. For example, URGENT focused on ``trial areas so that results on all aspects of the environment ... can then be generalised to apply more widely in Great Britain and beyond'' (page xi). Similarly, the URGENT report on end-user outputs states that ``due to the lack of information about these models [produced by URGENT researchers] it is difficult to say with confidence how generic or applicable they will be to other sites and situations'' (CEH, 2001, page 30). Within statements like this there is a clear assumption that the problem will be scaling up relevance from specific sites; relevance at the local level is taken for granted. The BUHP study was one of forty-one projects integrating urban ecological and environmental research across the geological, terrestrial, freshwater, and atmospheric sciences (URGENT, 2000). The initial project proposal was written in 1997 for an academically orientated project, based upon the expertise of biogeographers at the University of Birmingham, who had been involved with an international research group investigating urban to rural biodiversity gradients. At this stage the local planning authority was listed as a possible end-user of the research. NERC initially approved the project on the condition that they combine with teams from the Institute for Terrestrial Ecology and University of Newcastle, in order to introduce elements of geographical information systems and ecological modeling expertise, respectively. Proposals were filtered on academic grounds in the first round of applications, but the release of the Government's White Paper on Science and Innovation (DTI, 2000) prompted NERC to increase massively the importance of user community involvement in the second round of project bids. As one researcher involved with the bidding process stated, ``The first remit was effectively a call for science on urban areas that was relevant, and then it kind of expanded a bit, and suddenly we had to have these end-user products ... the end-user stuff kind of fell out at the end'' (BUHP project principal ecologist, 20 March 2001). Long-standing links existed between the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, and the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust, a local wildlife nongovernmental organisation. Following up the suggestions of the Wildlife Trust, the project expanded its end-user element with Birmingham local planning authority, and a steering committee was formed comprising the head strategic conservation planner for the city, two members of the Wildlife Trust, and a biologist and biogeographer from the University of Birmingham. The steering committee wrote the main (second round) proposal jointly. Projected end-user products included the provision of ecological data on the value of urban wastelands to biodiversity, and a GIS-based decision-support system to aid the planning of brownfield sites in the city. This system was to be based directly upon the results of an ecological study of the relative efficacy of habitat patches and wildlife corridors to support metapopulations of species within a fragmented urban landscape.
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The end-user groups were drawn from preexisting personal contacts and organisational ties between the university, the city council, and the local Wildlife Trust, and the format of the steering committee laid out clear roles for each of these groups. The research process itself was driven by academics, with the local planning authority occupying the role of main end-user, and the Wildlife Trust positioned as a bridging group between the scientific and political domains. The contextual history of the inception and evolution of the project as a network of organisations is essential to understanding how the interface between science and policy worked out in practice. But one final piece of context is needed before unfurling that particular drama, the actual scientific content of the project and its importance. Tensions between science and policy The BUHP project results directly contradicted the received knowledge of the policy community (Whitfield, 2001), and a basic appreciation of the wildlife corridor debate is necessary to understand the evolution of the project in relation to policy. Wildlife corridors are linear features that differ from the surrounding landscape, linking habitat areas that were once connected (Peck, 1998). They are widely used conservation tools in urban, exurban, rural, and wilderness landscapes to maintain higher levels of biodiversity (Barker, 1997; Fabos and Ryan, 2004), forming the basis for the European network of biogenetic reserves known as the Natura 2000 network (EEC, 1992; Jongman et al, 2004). The lineage of corridors runs through almost every planned urban form in history, from cities of classical Greece (Bacon, 1967), to Olmstead's parkways of Boston and the Bronx (Fabos, 2004; Little, 1990), and from Ebenezer Howard's garden city to the greenways of Milton Keynes. Corridors hold a deep-seated appeal for urban planners because they appear to reconcile ecological and human needs in a landscape (Forman, 1991). They do not require fundamental changes to planning practice because linear features like transport conduits form the basis for plan making, while in ecological terms the idea that corridors allow natural organisms to move between sites makes intuitive sense (Beier and Noss, 1998). There is a substantial literature on the science of what actually constitutes a corridor, and a number of terms are used with overlapping meanings (Dover, 2000; Gobster and Westphal, 2004), but this paper limits its field of concern to linear features that are legitimised within policy primarily upon ecological grounds. Although the protection of individual habitat patches is not unsupported in current planning policy, with local authorities recognising sites of local and national importance for nature conservation, habitat patches are not used as a metapopulation model to inform strategic landscape conservation policy in the way that corridors are. Since the 1970s, ``the start point [for conservation planning], certainly Birmingham's, is a network of linear open spaces'' (strategic conservation planning officer, Birmingham local planning authority, 8 November 2000). They are the key spatial ecological planning tool used by urban-planning authorities in the United Kingdom (Barker, 1997), and conservation policy focuses on the importance of maintaining the integrity of these networks. However, the ecological basis for corridors forms a long-standing point of contention. On the one side lies a wealth of anecdotal and intuitive evidence (Spellerberg and Gaywood, 1993), but little scientific evidence exists to prove that linear connectivity creates higher levels of biodiversity in a fragmented landscape (Dawson, 1994) owing to the difficulties of testing dynamic dispersal attributes both for individual species and communities of organisms (Adams and Dove, 1989). Corridors are species dependent, and thus also scale dependent: what constitutes a corridor habitat to one species may be ineffectual or even a barrier for another (Yanes et al, 1995).
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These uncertainties have led some commentators to claim that corridors ``appeal more as intuitive constructs than they do as a set of scientifically tested findings'' (Boothby, 2000, page 283). The BUHP project aimed to clarify this situation, by using species distribution sampling to investigate dispersal patterns and biodiversity levels along wildlife corridors in the urban environment. Results indicated that wildlife corridors, ``whilst [an] important habitat, may not function as movement corridors for all species'' (URGENT, 2001). Specific studies of invertebrate dispersal (Small, 2002; Small et al, 2003), seed banks (Austin, 2002), butterflies, and rare plants on urban wasteland habitat patches and wetland corridors in Birmingham drew similar conclusions. As opposed to connectivity, ``The limiting factor is type of habitatöthe geography of it doesn't matter a jot, because they [species] are so mobile that if it's there then they're on it. So it's not dispersal limited, it's all about habitat quality, which is quite an interesting finding, and has real relevance to planners'' (BUHP project biogeographer, 27 March 2001). Although Birmingham's nature conservation policy is dominated by the orthodoxy of wildlife corridors (Birmingham City Council, 1997), the BUHP project research indicated that maintaining habitat patches within the urban landscape is more beneficial to biodiversity. In light of these results, the chairman of the URGENT ecology steering group claimed that, ``urban planning and management is substantially based on a set of myths. How we communicate these issues to the policy community is vital'' (URGENT annual meeting, 5 April 2001). Myth is a strong word, and prompts some mention of the resonance of this story with broader tensions between traditional and nonequilibrium paradigms of ecology and nature conservation (Adams, 1997; Zimmerer, 2000b). The specific conceptual difficulties surrounding the BUHP project that make it such a fecund example of science ^ policy translation tie into wider debates concerning the remit and spatiotemporal horizons of British planning (Murdoch and Lowe, 2003), neoliberal spatialities (Coombes, 2003), and the political ecology of the United Kingdom. However, that is another story (Evans, 2004a). This paper is concerned with how the collision between science and policy threw the task of translation into sharp relief. The end-user steering process The end-user steering group met during the period over which the first two project proposals were written to identify and develop end-user products, and it was during this stage of the research that the relations between scientists and policymakers became critical to the success of the project. Six deliverables were proposed from the project (CEH, 2001), but the key products explored here are the decision-support system, species database, and handbook for planners, as the steering-group sought to apply the findings of the project to core policies framing strategic plan-making and development control. The decision support system was intended to enable planners to explore the biodiversity of derelict sites in the West Midlands. Two major sources of conflict between planners and scientists emerged; first, the ability of scientific research to provide definitive `yes or no' answers to planning questions, and second, the degree to which scientific findings about corridors and patches were to be incorporated into the system. The original project proposals for the decision-support system state that the software was ``to allow planners and developers to analyse the effects of the changing habitat patches in the urban environment'' (URGENT, 2001), but this seemed to be out of step with the requirements of the local planning authority:
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``Effectively what they want to know is for any given site, they want to be able to click on a map and have an inventory. [Interviewer: A species inventory?] Yes. And what they're looking for is anything that has got legal protection ... they're not so worried about the science that says `well you require 17 of those sites every 10 km2 to make this function'. That's all irrelevant'' (URGENT ecologist, 27 March 2001). The gap between end-user expectations for science to provide comprehensive and definitive answers, and the actual output of the project was a constant source of tension over the course of the end-user steering-committee meetings. As another ecologist associated with the project stated off the record, ``this kind of information could not be provided through the project itself.'' This tension became acute in the development of the decision-support system, as many of the scientist's claims concerning the relative insignificance of corridors was not able to be used by the planners öit simply was not considered `useful'. Rather, planners remained wedded to a practical and legal framework for warranting ecological knowledge, requesting information concerning the existence of protected species on particular sites. Because corridors form the basis for conservation planning policy in Birmingham they remained the basis for the decision-support system, leading to the compromise of `patches on corridors'. Other interested parties held their own opinions about the relationship between the researchers and end-users, ``They [the URGENT researchers] haven't liaised enough with the end-users, it really needed a lot more steering. It's become a purely academic project öthere's no decision, no support, and no system'' (member of Wildlife Trust, BUHP end-user steering committee, 17 January 2001). Although more information was desired about what species were where (a `query site' function was developed to map sites on and off corridors), there was little demand for new types of knowledge; the emphasis remained firmly upon the location of corridors despite the findings of the BUHP project. The decision-support system typified this, making the raw survey data from the research available to planners, but not using the insights of analysis to reform strategic planning policy. The contribution of the project to the wider policy debate over corridors was, perhaps, a more realistic arena in which to influence planning, and the handbook of recommendations on urban planning was a potential vehicle through which to do this. However, ``The difficulty with any such manual is that action ultimately comes down to interpreting site-specific data. Many members of the project steering group felt that to interpret ecological data it is necessary to employ an ecologist'' (URGENT, 2001, page E1). Birmingham local planning authority did not employ an ecologist. As a result, the planning handbook became ``a simple checklist for strategic planners to consider biodiversity in an urban habitat'' (URGENT, 2001, page E1), concentrating upon the implications of different types of site management. Because the handbook was intended to be of practical use, little was said to challenge the overall framework of planning policy, and the importance of maintaining a landscape habitat patch mosaic was subordinated to guidelines for atomistic site management. Context and dislocation Although the BUHP study indicated that planning policy should shift away from the orthodoxy of corridors towards the conservation of habitat patches, and the academics involved with the project clearly believed that this would drive local policy,
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it became apparent that the policymakers expected scientific tools and models to support existing policies. The seeds of the schism lay in the inception and initial stages of the project, which set the parameters for its subsequent development. First and foremost, the project began life as an academic project. The scientific rationale for the study reflected academic concerns, in terms of the application of ecological theories to urban habitat patches. The actual study sites were initially to be taken from the local planning authorities database of some 500 brownfield sites in the city, but in reality this database was incomplete and out of date. As one of the BUHP co-investigators said, ``our PhD students found 37 sites just driving around'' (6 February 2001). While the topics for study were developed in accordance with end-users, the core of the project in which the science was `done' functioned as a purely academic exercise, reducing the end-user element to something of a bolt-on consideration. Scientific knowledge was created through scientifically rigorous methodological frameworks and fieldwork practices, and warranted through the academic channels of PhD research and publication in peer-reviewed journals (Knorr, 1981) in order to engage with national and international academia (through conferences and publication and so forth). Indeed, the reception of the results of the project by the wider academic community concerned the scientists far more than its impact upon local planners. Scientists, especially those involved with large-scale scientific projects, are under increasing pressure to produce findings that are both `new' and challenge orthodoxy. Some of the political motivations for this are obvious, in terms of establishing future career paths in academia and foregrounding follow-up research bids. Some are more specific, such as a degree of bad feeling alluded to in a number of interviews between the BUHP scientists and another regional research institution that had indirectly contributed to the Nature Conservation Strategy of the city. The primary (that is, academic) context in which the BUHP scientists were operating thus demanded the production of strong knowledge claims for the project. However, these types of absolute knowledge claims produced a degree of epistemological closure that hindered the effective translation of knowledge. The strength of the claims made by the BUHP project was indicated most clearly in the contrast made by the URGENT Ecology Steering Group chairman with the `myths' of the policymaking community. The steering process was not used to enrol end-users into the process of knowledge production, being based around two inception meetings that then became part of the steering group meetings. These inception meetings adhered to the idea of knowledge transfer rather than translation. As one planner involved with the project said, ``I went to a few talks, and the way the results are formulated is not very accessible to planners. There was no indication of why certain species are studied instead of others, and why corridors seemed to be the focus'' (Nature conservation officer, 9 May 2001). Rather than integrating the two groups, the research process sequenced the scientific and end-user components (Davoudi and Evans, 2005), with end-users involved with the initial steering and output steering, but not in the knowledge-production phase. The resulting epistemological closure was particularly divisive when questions were raised as to the credibility of the knowledge, how well articulated it was, and how much stock should be placed in the claims it was making. This internal technocracy was reinforced on one side by the expectations of policymakers that science would give `all the answers', and on the other by a lack of comprehension on the part of the scientists about the constraints upon policy
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change, rendering the technical and the political spheres incommensurable.(1) As a result, the end-user community complained that, ``URGENT's work is very scientific ... it's all very impressive but how is it going to feed into policy?'' (Urban advisor, English Nature, 17 January 2001). The knowledge produced by the URGENT project was thus used selectively by end-users to reinforce existing conservation planning practices organised around corridors. As the project unfolded, points of contestation became symptomatic of differing organisational constraints, and here the idea of relevance is critical. For example, the idea that corridors may not be the most efficient spatial conservation model appeared to have some currency amongst planners, ``We are too much hooked on having wildlife corridors ... if there is an argument presented to me that it needs something more than a corridor, and we ought to be looking at the wider picture of what is happening, then that's for someone to inform us, and we'll take it and incorporate it'' (case officer, Birmingham local planning authority, 26 February 2002). However, as an ecologist who was heavily involved with the area's local biodiversity action plan of the area pointed out, ``People have baggage with them, so you will get planners who say one thing over coffee, but then go back to their offices, and are restricted by policies, by resources and so on and there's only so much they can do'' (13 March 2001). A good deal of this organisational `baggage' takes the form of temporal dislocations between local learning and policy change. Unitary development plans are one of the few proactive tools available to strategic planners (Muir et al, 2000) and, being open to consultation, they represent a key outlet for policy-relevant science. However, they are relatively unwieldy and unresponsive, taking on average five and a half years to produce (Steel et al, 1995), and operating for ten years as binding policy. Although it is not my intention in this paper to rehearse an extended critique of the environmental capacity of the British planning system (Marshall and Smith, 1999; Rydin, 1998), similar dislocations afflict national planning policy, open to consultation by all interested parties, but only revised every seven to ten years. With specific reference to wildlife corridors, the BUHP project was not aided by the outmoded Planning Policy Guidance Note 9 upon nature conservation, which needs updating to clarify the increasing policy slippage between `wildlife' corridors and multifunctional `green' corridors, and individual precedents that are set when inspectors uphold principles such as corridors on appeal [although this situation may be clarified with the introduction of the new Planning Policy Statement 9: Biodiversity and Geological Conservation over the next few years, which directly mentions `networks of natural habitats' (ODPM, 2004b, page 9)]. However, the point of impact of the BUHP research was not focused upon local end-user needs in time (coordinated with policy review) or space (contributing to networks of dissemination). Rethinking the local It is possible to think these processes of separation and dislocation through in terms of how they reproduced preexisting local relations. In the case of the BUHP project the local Wildlife Trust was intended to act as the bridging organisation, having a formal (1) Davoudi
S, 2004, ``Strategic waste planning: the interface between the `technical' and the `political' '', paper presented at Municipal Waste ManagementöPolicy Without Evidence? ESRC Transdisciplinary Seminar Series, ESRC Award no. R451 265 286. Three seminars were held at the University of Birmingham and three at the University of Cambridge. Further details and a summary discussion paper can be found at http://www.certbham.ac.uk/urbanenvironment/index.htm.
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conservation interest in both ecology and planning issues. However, the Wildlife Trust increasingly cast themselves as end-users as the project progressed. The Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust have an intriguingly ambivalent relationship with Birmingham City Council, being consultants, consultees, and protagonists to different parts of the local planning authority. Because the BUHP challenged planning policies that they had helped to write as consultees, in this case they were more inclined to side with the planners than against them. This problem has been noted by Cowell and Murdoch (1999), whereby groups that are too connected into local networks merely play out preexisting conflicts in a new arena. Similarly, Adger et al (2002, page 1107) identify institutional inertia as a major determinant of decisionmaking in the realm of nature conservation. The actual process of creating and warranting knowledge polarised the groups, with an unproductive division between providers of knowledge (scientists) and receivers of knowledge (policymakers). Serres (1995) casts this relation in terms of an age-old division between `knowledge producers' and `law makers', and he speculates that knowledge is like a cord tying actors in a network together, with the law representing the becoming taut of that cord or tie. ``By means of brief little pulls, it [the cord] conveys information ... when continuously pulled taut, it transmits force or power. At its constraining limits it imprisons, but it leaves elbowroom prior to this maximum'' (1995, page 108). The decision-support system demonstrates this ambivalent relationship between knowledge and law. Over the initial steering-group period a series of small pulls conveyed information between the actors, but at the constraining limit during the end-user product-development negotiations these ties became taut, with knowledge in the final instance being reduced to the legal conservation requirements of site-based species protection. In other words, when push came to shove, planners needed to be `appeal-proof' which encouraged them to stick with policies that inspectors would be most likely to uphold. The development of the handbook for planners demonstrated similar dynamics. As an end product it had no clear political status, forming neither supplementary planning policy, nor part of the nature conservation strategy of the city. Serres links the knowledge ^ policy dynamic to the reproduction of the local through the notion of the objects of spatial knowledge: ``In the cord, we find the sciences of space and the genesis of their objects ... who can be surprised that the cord also binds together rigorous knowledge and law?'' (1995, page 108). So knowledge and law are intimately tied up with the genesis or performance of spatial objects such as the local. Perhaps there is less `elbow-room' (to use Serres's phrase) for manoeuvre at the local level, precisely because the `local' finds its genesis in a more tightly bound cord. This antagonistic relationship between knowledge and law explains the failure of the bridging group to establish middle ground. Accordingly, the `local' can be seen as an implicit form of boundary work between the political (law) and scientific (knowledge) spheres, and the imperative to make new connections between scientists and policymakers is simultaneously an imperative to rearticulate the `local' as a meaningful field of environmental governance. This analysis prompts further consideration of what the relations between institutions should look like in order to move beyond the unhelpful dislocations produced by the linear models of policy and science. The BUHP example indicates that the logical end-point of partnership rhetoric, the integration of science and politics, merely reproduces rather than transcends the reductive linear model. What seem to be needed are quality relations between the institutions of knowledge and politics that are sensitive
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to the various spatialities of the local implicated in the performances of scientists, policymakers, and government. In the Politics of Nature, Latour (2004) suggests a two-tier process, requiring, first, the protection of the autonomy of different groups (scientists and politicians, but also administrators, economists, and moralists in his typology) to ask their own questions (take things into account), and then, second, the provision of a way for each group to contribute to the ordering of these practices. The critical factor in this `new constitution' (Latour, 2004, page 123) is the involvement of all groups in each stage, rather than the serialisation into scientists first `taking account' (of facts), separated from policymakers who then order the importance of these facts (using values). Although there is no room here to explore the `experimental metaphysics' (Latour, 2004, page 241) that ensues [although see Hinchliffe (2001), for an indication of what this may look like in the realm of environmental governance], it is worth considering avenues of research upon local environmental governance that have relevance to this task. These areas tend to address the pragmatic task of creating an appreciation by various groups of the constraints upon each other. As Flyvberg argues, ``knowledge about the phenomena which decide whether ... knowledge gets to count as important is at least as important as the knowledge itself '' (2001, page 142, quoted by Davoudi, personal communication). It is possible to contrast the BUHP project in which actors were bound to their official roles with initiatives such as the Local Biodiversity Action Planning process, which created a more reflexive space in which a plurality of actors could operate in more than just their official capacity (Selman and Wragg, 1999), and build up detailed understandings of what was and was not possible in different contexts (Evans, 2004b). Such modes of governance have also begun to engage with lay knowledges and experiential encounters with nature (Hinchliffe et al, 2005), which are vital to the inclusive political philosophy associated with the `new localism' of UK governance. Such looser networks of governance have the potential to coordinate knowledge and policy at different levels, and funding bodies are recognising the broader remit of this challenge, talking about `hero researchers', `skilled knowledge brokers', `science connoisseurs' (Healey, 2004), and the need to allocate resources for research projects to foster loose networks capable of meaningfully meeting policy needs (Peter Hedges, EPSRC Science Sector Associate Programme Manager, personal communication). One way to coordinate the potential for science to act at different levels of governance is to identify what Haines-Young (personal communication) terms a `decision-space'ö a clear conceptual and institutional framework for acting upon the findings of the project. A decision space represents a pragmatic interpretation of the new institutionalist notion of a policy arena in which change can occur (Healey, 1997). The creation of both a horizontal (neighbouring areas of policy that can be altered, such as recreation policy), and vertical (the degree of freedom within national and regional policy) decision spaces may serve to establish some degree of spatiotemporal synchronisation between science and policy at specific levels of governance (Berkes, 2002). Conclusions In this paper I asked whether local knowledge production provides a connection between scientists and policymakers. In short, in this case it did not. Despite the avowed end-user orientation of the BUHP project, it became apparent that the expectations and involvement of academics and end-users were at odds. Epistemological closure and organisational differences between scientists and policymakers hindered the translation of local science into local governance by dislocating the two groups. This failure was related to the technocratic bias of the translation process, including funding priorities, the perceptual biases of those involved, and the preexisting institutional arrangements.
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The separation of powers between science and policy was reproduced through the BUHP network, and the bridging group largely failed to transcend this opposition as they reverted to the role of end-user as the project progressed. O'Riordan has claimed that ``environmental science needs to recognise the scope for changing patterns of governance and power that the emerging worlds of sustainability offer'' (2004, page 234), arguing that the emerging emphasis upon the local level in government policy represents a key arena in which geographers can take up this challenge. This paper has argued that the failure to transform knowledge in the case of the BUHP was intimately bound up with the reproduction of the local as an awkward, uncooperative, and even obstructive, level of governance. If the local is to find its genesis in a more effective relationship between knowledge and policy, approaches are needed that engage with the spatialities of environmental work. While there are dangers of extrapolating from one case study, the need to coordinate knowledge-driven local policy processes has been recognised in other areas of concern, such as biodiversity conservation (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, 2000), waste management (Davoudi and Evans, 2005) and air quality management (Brooks, 2004). If environmental science is to change patterns of governance then it needs to jettison the dualistic rhetoric of evidence-based policy, and focus instead upon establishing quality relations between the institutions of knowledge and policy that can transcend and transform existing levels of governance. Acknowledgements. This research was made possible by an ESRC and NERC interdisciplinary research studentship (R00429934133), and was written up mainly under the auspices of an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (T026271328). I would like to thank my colleagues in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham for their support, and all the people who attended the ESRC Transdisciplinary Seminar Series on knowledge and power, which shaped many of the ideas in this paper. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous referees for their stream of ideas, encouragement, and useful comments, and the people I interviewed who were kind enough to share their knowledge, experiences, and opinions with me. The usual disclaimers apply. References Adams L, Dove L, 1989 Wildlife Reserves and Corridors in the Urban Environment: a Guide to Ecological Landscape Planning and Resource Conservation (National Institute for Urban Wildlife, Columbia) Adams W, 1997, ``Rationalisation and conservation: ecology and the management of nature in the UK'' Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 22 277 ^ 291 Adger W N, Brown K, Fairbrass J, Jordan A, Paavola J, Rosendo S, Seyfang G, 2003, ``Governance for sustainability: towards a `thick'analysis of environmental decisionmaking'' Environment and Planning A 35 1095 ^ 1110 Austin K, 2002 Botanical Processes in Urban Derelict Spaces unpublished PhD thesis, School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham Bacon E, 1967 Design of Cities (Thames and Hudson, London) Barker G, 1997 A Framework for the Future: Green Networks with Multiple Uses In and Around Towns and Cities (English Nature, Northminster House, Peterborough PE1 1UA) Bebbington A, 2000, ``Reencountering development'' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 495 ^ 520 Beier P, Noss R, 1998, ``Do habitat corridors provide connectivity?'' Conservation Biology 12 1241 ^ 1252 Berkes F, 2002, ``Cross-scale institutional linkages for commons management: perspectives from the bottom up'', in The Drama of the Commons Eds E Ostrom, T Dietz, N Dolsak, P Stern, S Stonich, E Weber (National Academy Press, Washington, DC) pp 293 ^ 321 Birmingham City Council, 1997 Nature Conservation Strategy for Birmingham Department of Planning and Architecture, The Council House, Victoria Square, Birmingham B1 1BB Boothby J, 2000, ``An ecological focus for landscape planning'' Landscape Research 25 281 ^ 289
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