Building a National interdisciplinary Urban Research Mobilization Network: National Conversation, September 17 2024

Executive Summary 

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Wildlife and Landscape Science Directorate (WLSD) has launched a dedicated initiative to help conserve and promote nature in Canadian municipalities.

The aim: To build a national, interdisciplinary urban research mobilization network to connect different groups and sectors and enable research mobilization to help drive action at the local level.

Network co-development process: Our approach is focused on building relationships and trust with our stakeholders and rightsholders and building the network in partnership, integrating diverse needs, and establishing common goals.

Our first step: Gaining insights, building connections and enabling knowledge exchange. A national, virtual meeting was held on September 17th 2024 to convene interested parties across Canada. The meeting followed an inclusive and highly participatory design.

Approximately 260 people from coast to coast to coast and across sectors, interests and groups joined our session! A post-meeting survey was also issued to ~400 meeting registrants (72 respondents).

Participant feedback from the meeting discussions and the post-meeting survey were compiled into a comprehensive

What We Heard report

This is a summary of some of the valuable insights that emerged.

Key takeaways

What we heard from meeting and post-meeting survey participants:

• There is a strong need for a national, interdisciplinary, urban research mobilization network. This need was echoed across sectors, groups, and regions.

• Those working in the urban space face many barriers. But a national, interdisciplinary, urban research mobilization network offers many solutions!
  Proposed solutions:
  • Facilitating communication and collaboration across sectors: Breaking down siloes, building relationships, trust, and strengthening cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary collaborations, notably between researchers and practitioners!
  • Providing necessary resources, tools, and funding, through network outputs such as building a directory of local experts, a filterable library, a job-board, tracking tools for stewardship initiatives, and funding access tools for new grant and research opportunities
  • Facilitating collection and access to environmental and biodiversity data, employing tactics such as developing standards for data collection and accessible data sets and providing best data management practices
  • Strengthening outreach, engagement and environmental education: Building community awareness and engaging, training, and inspiring youth!
  • Supporting community science – better mobilizing community science data and ensuring it is accessible to those who need it
  • Weaving in Indigenous and other marginalized voices and enabling conservation partnerships with First Nations and knowledge co-production
  • Mobilizing knowledge and translating research to make it more accessible to other sectors, including municipal practitioners, decision-makers and the general public
• Some suggested tactics and outputs:
  • incorporating creative and artistic approaches to engage more broadly
  • telling stories of lived experience and community impacts
  • online platforms to share case studies and experience
  • newsletters (academics sharing research, practitioners identifying research needs)
  • policy briefs, research syntheses, accessible reports for municipal decision makers

Participants also questioned what should be mobilized:

Participants shared many practical insights and recommendations on building a successful network. 

These included:

• Ensuring sufficient resources, time and funding – dedicated support will be critical.
• Purposeful, inclusive design: Establish clear objectives, aims and focus. Strive for inclusive governance and membership with representation of researchers and practitioners, and diverse voices, including Indigenous and other marginalized communities, and ensuring an intergenerational capacity
• Avoiding redundancies and overlap: Awareness of similar initiatives, identification of gaps to ensure value and complementarity in work.

Participants also provided many examples of successful networks and programs, and shared some of their own stories and lived experience.

These will help to inform network development.

Next steps

These insights and recommendations will help to guide network development.

Next steps may include:

• Identifying network leads and confirming support capacity
• Engaging with existing networks to enable synergy with ongoing work
• Establishing clear network purpose, scope and priority areas of action
• Building a network framework based on recommendations and best practices
• Exploring and applying to available funding mechanisms