Why is boundary spanning needed more than ever?

New modes of practice are needed to respond to climate change, biodiversity extinction and sustainable development goals in cities. Disciplinary focused, sectoral and siloed approaches to actions in cities have proven to be ineffective given the spatial and social complexities in cities; these approaches often result in solutions that are mono-functional or not coordinated and integrated across scales and sectors1. The complexity inherent in socio-ecological systems in cities requires constantly bridging science, policy and practice, and co-production of knowledge across these domains. ‘Boundary work’ theory2 offers a useful lens in understanding and promoting knowledge transfer between science, policy and practice. In the context of cities and climate change science, knowledge boundary spanners play a critical role in translating complex scientific evidence on climate change into actionable urban policies and practices.

The critical role of ‘Boundary spanners’ or ‘Boundary actors’ has been increasingly acknowledged in scholarship focused on knowledge co-production across disciplines, particularly in administration, management and leadership scholarship3,4,5. Increasingly, boundary spanning has been discussed in landscape and environmental management, and infrastructure governance as a lever for building trust among stakeholders with diverse values and priorities, and building interdependencies across spatial and organisational boundaries6,7,8.

An emerging body of research highlights the importance of spanning different boundaries in closing the gap between science, policy and practice in meeting global socio-environmental challenges. Evidence has shown that to address climate induced challenges in cities, integrated adaptation and mitigation actions that are coordinated across scales, sectors and actors of the built environment are required9. Additionally, for integrated climate actions a two-way dialogue between climate change research and practice-based knowledge is needed in bridging boundaries across knowledge systems (scientific, practical, tacit, and indigenous knowledge systems)10,11. Unlike conventional knowledge brokers who might simply transfer climate data between researchers and city officials, boundary spanners actively reconcile the different epistemological frameworks, temporal horizons, and priorities that characterise academic climate science and urban governance12.

Boundary spanning for integrated climate actions in the built environment has remained largely understudied. Addressing this research gap is critical given that built environments are responsible for generating a significant amount of the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change impacts on cities13. There is a lack of empirical knowledge about how boundary spanners bridge the science-practice gaps for integrated actions and within what conditions they operate. Additionally, practice insights into contextual challenges faced by these actors are lacking. This perspective piece aims to shed light on these questions, drawing on personal experiences and reflections of four boundary spanners, revealing four different but interlinked tales of boundary spanning for climate actions in cities.

These insights contribute to expanding knowledge about how boundary actors (re)develop their own conceptual frames, practice models and professional ethos while aiming to create impact and advance knowledge boundaries for integrated climate actions across science, policy and practice.

How is boundary spanning for climate action defined in theory?

Boundary spanners often function as catalysts for knowledge integration and collaborative innovation across otherwise impermeable boundaries. Bednarek et al.14, define the practice of boundary spanning as ‘work to enable exchange between the production and use of knowledge to support evidence-informed decision-making in a specific context’, and define boundary spanner actors ‘as individuals or organizations that specifically and actively facilitate this process’14. Others have highlighted the connecting and intermediary roles of boundary spanners15.

Boundary spanning is conceptualised in two ways across literature. Firstly, at the scale of the larger frame of ‘actions’ where boundary spanning is described variously as a ‘process’16, and secondly framed within an ‘actor network’ with varying problem frames and actor configurations6 where a complex environment is scanned for opportunities3 and new frontiers are discovered17. Boundary spanners share some common attributes across the literature, but these are nuanced in how actors are framed in relation to actions and the context wherein actions take form: the boundary spanner as a transformer of knowledge, engaged in selecting and translating across boundaries16, directing information flows and connecting people, networks and processes as intermediaries across organisations3,18.

The leadership role of boundary spanners is debated in literature. In the context of diffusion of innovation, Matous and Wang19 draw a distinction between ‘boundary spanners’ and ‘opinion leaders’. Opinion leaders are defined as popular individuals whom others seek for information, and new practices or innovation will diffuse widely in communities only if opinion leaders accept them. However, actors who operate on the margins of networks whose attention is often directed outwards, can leverage the diffusion of external innovation if they are trusted within the network. To Noordegraaf20, performing and earning trust are key to navigating relations while being ‘wired in’, in order to be taken serious and enact authority, especially in a post-truth era20.

Matous and Wang19 further question whether boundary spanners are in fact different types of leaders. Earlier, Williams21 had argued that boundary spanning is a type of collaboratively inclined leadership, distinguishing it from traditional leadership, emphasising the facilitative and catalytic approach that boundary spanners carry to shift between being reticulists, entrepreneurs and innovators, and/or leaders21. These attributional qualities are highly relevant in the context of climate actions, where scientific evidence must navigate competing political interests, budget constraints, and community concerns, requiring multi-perspectives, shifting roles and alternative leadership models.

How is boundary spanning applied in practice?

While the extant literature has established theoretical grounding of boundary spanning, further empirical evidence on boundary spanning in practice for climate actions is needed. Empirical studies reflected in the literature tend to emphasise how boundary spanning occurs in relation to transdisciplinarity11,22,23, or how boundary spanners function within organisational partnerships16. Often boundary spanner experiences are evaluated through a theoretical framework, unpacking the skills, attributes, competencies and benefits of boundary spanners in various disciplines. For example, Taylor et al.11 provide insights on the experiences of seven embedded researchers operating in six Southern African cities across four dimensions: trust-based relationships; collaborative agenda-setting and combining different knowledges; promoting reflexivity and innovation; and navigating multiple accountabilities. This work builds upon and extends these studies by offering an alternate trajectory across the science-policy-practice nexus by highlighting conceptual frames that underpin current practices of boundary spanning for climate actions, and the associated challenges and opportunities across a range of practice models. Drawing on the experiences of four boundary spanning actors to elucidate their own theoretical framings, this research foregrounds how boundary actors (re)construct conceptual frames, as ways of contextualising and validating their roles and practice models that enable them to situate themselves in, and act within and across, diverse contexts and networks. Hence each tale responds to the three dimensions of boundary roles, conceptual frames, and practice models to provide a consistent lens through which the narratives can be read and interpreted.

(Re)framing boundary spanning from practice to theory

The bridge and the anchor: navigating knowledge universes (by Debra Roberts)

Boundary role

I have always been a boundary person. As an early career researcher investigating opportunities for biodiversity conservation in the urban context, I realised that science does not translate well outside of academia and is often an afterthought in urban decision-making. The reason is that it rarely speaks directly to the actual needs and priorities of everyday people. I learned the hard way that if I wanted my research to make a difference in the real world, being a competent scientist was insufficient - I would also have to become fluent in the language, skills and technologies of urban practitioners. What I learned was humbling.

Conceptual frames

Practitioner knowledge is complex, responsive to societal needs, politically astute, ever evolving and often ahead of the academic literature. To be welcomed into the practitioner knowledge universe required me to spend substantial amounts of time with members of that community, learning from them and purposefully building a trust relationship through demonstrating how my scientific knowledge could help them get their job done better. Trust building is a critical part of boundary spanning as it not only permits but sustains access to the different knowledge universes and facilitates the transfer of knowledge between them24. For example, trust can be built by showing practitioners that their knowledge and scientific knowledge, while different, are equally important for effective action. For the scientific community, trust is built by showing how practitioner knowledge can help in the framing of better scientific questions, ultimately generating better science. Without trust there is enormous inertia at the interfaces between knowledge systems as gatekeepers ward off newcomers. The truism that knowledge is power holds.

Practice models

My experience also suggests that effective boundary spanners do not remain at the boundary of different knowledge universes. If they did, they would have no real leverage or impact. In fact, they need to become opinion leaders and influencers not only in their home universe, but also in the universes that they interact with. You must have respect and influence to build and sustain partnerships that can drive transformative change. It is a demanding task. It is also not a static role as knowledge is constantly growing and morphing, and society’s needs are ever changing. Therefore, boundary spanners must be nimble, creative, and able to build new bridges and burn down some old ones. At the end of the day boundary spanners can’t fear failure and need to welcome it as a learning experience that opens new possibilities.

The messy middle (by Jorn Verbeeck)

Boundary role

Curating urban complexity often means embracing it. I started my career as a local journalist, asking questions and collating voices and perspectives to develop narratives and create meaning to a wide audience. Later, working as a local policy officer, I challenged the idea of society as something that was merely shaped by policies, policy domains, strategies and operations. The urban fabric is more than the agenda of city hall. Cities are vibrant ecosystems, with intricately connected networks of hopes, dreams, and fears, but also of knowledge, creativity, culture, and capital, brought together by a myriad of actors in various private, professional and societal roles. With societies becoming more global and complex, and with subsequent schools of public management and organisational efficiency approaches, boundaries were de facto installed by design to paradoxically tackle complexity, and ultimate responsibility was mostly left to governments. Addressing wicked challenges such as climate change, globalisation, inequality, aging, digitalization, and migration is however impossible without a multi-perspective, multi-sector, and multi-actor approach and without balancing facts and emotions, relationships and friction. Over the past 20 years, I have consciously switched jobs a few times to adopt different urban actor perspectives and understand where to find crossways.

Conceptual frames

Born between Limits to Growth25 and the First IPCC Assessment Report26, I have experienced boundary spanning to be about the dots and the space in between; in an urban context, the dots are what Charles Landry would call the hardware (physical infrastructures), software (urban activities, from industries, over to social and cultural), and orgware (how the urban ecosystem is powered, structured, governed, and curated)27. Boundary spanning for me is about navigating the space and the continuous dialogue in between: the messy middle28. I have always been intrigued and driven not just by how to go from ambition to implementation, but rather how outcome and impact fit into the wider long-time framework, and in an urban context, what makes people come together and be open for change, who is leading change, and why the messy middle sometimes also is a missing middle.

Practice models

As messy middles hold a set of many plausible future scenarios and a myriad of truths that can co-exist, I like to picture boundary spanning as curating a temporary urban art exhibition, offering a window to particular insights but also the wholeness we lost over the past centuries. What provides a narrative to one, might be messy or a welcome nothing space to another; an art exhibition that can unsettle and/or create a sense of belonging, that addresses identity and authenticity, and by acknowledging the DNA of land and place weaves in the local with the universal. For me, boundary spanning is therefore about inviting, uniting, showing, wondering, recounting, ritualising, and in a Jane Jacobs-way, simultaneously interpreting, connecting, and shaping29. Boundary spanners help convene and create trust, shepherd new coalitions and steward uncertainty into unprecedented journeys, holding up a mirror to our personal, professional, and collective contribution to support communities. They hold the common responsibility in safeguarding viable, healthy and resilient futures.

Rhizomic boundary spanning with communities, for communities (by Sarah Bell)

Boundary role

My work as an academic interested in urban sustainability and resilience spans boundaries across disciplines. I started my career looking for technical solutions as an engineer, moved to social science to understand why it was so hard to implement them, and have built a career in the interstices of departments and disciplines. I have led interdisciplinary research initiatives across university faculties and in collaboration with external industry and government stakeholders. Climate change resilience, adaptation and mitigation are embedded within my work on both specific sectoral concerns, like urban water management, and broader approaches, such as urban sustainability or retrofitting.

I also work within and beyond the boundaries of the university to collaborate and support grassroots community groups in research and teaching30. This has included leading research projects to develop methods for community-based co-design of urban infrastructures to address the water-energy-food nexus, improve urban water management, and retrofit streets with green infrastructure. I also created The Engineering Exchange to connect community groups with researchers to answer specific technical questions relating to housing, air quality, transport and other urban challenges.

Conceptual frames

To use the language of Deleuze and Guattari31, I am doing rhizomatic work in an arborescent institution. The university is structured as a tree, with knowledge growing in tall trunks with hierarchical branching. The work of solving climate and other urban challenges is a rhizome, often underground, a flat, complex network that can be entered and navigated in multiple ways. Eileen32, a community collaborator in our work in London, describes ‘grassroots’ communities in similar terms, as a way of explaining why formal community collaboration with universities is so hard – inside the boundaries they have fundamentally different forms and structures.

Practice models

Rhizomes move information and resources, and they keep trees alive, working between and in mutual dependence with plants and other creatures to create healthy, productive forests. My boundary spanning work has involved moving university resources across networks to support community contributions to academic work, sometimes testing the boundaries of university administration. It brings knowledge and creativity from the grassroots and industry into the academic forest. I have built temporary institutional structures, like The Engineering Exchange, to provide entry points for communities into the university. My research projects have produced diverse outputs and impacts ranging across academic books and articles, installed rainwater tanks, and helped raise funds for projects and change policy to improve local neighbourhoods30.

My boundary work has all be done as an academic, employed full-time in a university. The balance of my workload has shifted across research, teaching and engagement and my career has benefited from growing recognition within universities of the value of collaboration with external stakeholders in achieving impact beyond the academy. Theories of knowledge and boundary spanning help make sense of this way of working, and to recognise my own modes of leadership and influence.

The unacknowledged art of academic boundary spanning (by Cathy Oke)

Boundary role

As someone who has been moving between academic and professional roles within Universities for the past 15yearsII have experienced firsthand a system that traditionally rewards academic disciplinary specialisation over transdisciplinary engagement. Despite formal recognition via practice focused employment categories within r Universities – such as Enterprise Professors or Knowledge Brokers - that acknowledge and engage with the critical contributions individuals can make in bridging research and practice, this work is often not well situated in formal evaluation, or professional reward mechanisms.

Conceptual frames

Despite the critical importance of such knowledge spanning actors, measuring their impact presents methodological and conceptual challenges. The diffuse, relational, and often invisible nature of boundary spanning work resists straightforward quantification and attribution. From experience I note a few factors contributing to this measurement and attribution difficulty, which is confounded in my specialization of city climate action:

First, climate knowledge and local action spans complex urban systems. The non-linear progression from climate evidence to urban policy implementation means that contributions of knowledge from intermediaries, may manifest years after their initial engagement, making temporal attribution challenging. Traditional evaluation frameworks fail to capture these emergent, long-term impacts that unfold through iterative interactions rather than linear cause-effect relationships33.

Second, I have often played a role as a catalyst or broker rather than direct implementer, such as bringing in multiple experts to discuss how a city might adopt the SDGs in their decision making; or as a formal knowledge broker of an environmental science program drawing from my diverse networks to build multidisciplinary urban greening research teams. My value often lies in stepping back and creating enabling conditions—building trust, facilitating dialogue, translating concepts—rather than producing or being recognized in the actual outputs. These process contributions, which Fazey et al.34 characterise as ‘intermediate outcomes’, remain largely invisible in conventional impact metrics focused on policy adoption or infrastructure development.

Third, measuring impact is complicated by what Feldman and Ingram35 term the ‘counterfactual problem’—how to determine what would have happened without the boundary spanner’s intervention. When climate adaptation becomes successfully mainstreamed into urban planning processes, the boundary spanner’s role in this integration may become obscured precisely because of their effectiveness in making climate considerations appear as natural components of urban governance rather than external impositions36.

Practice model

My practice mode is all about collaboration, but this creates attribution challenges. Boundary spanners rarely act alone but instead mobilise networks of actors across scientific and practice communities37. This mode is what makes multidisciplinary research so exciting and important, it is what drives the work of groups like the Melbourne Centre for Cities. We can measure the collective impact of our group work, but it’s difficult to attribute or reward individual contributions. The very concept of ‘impact’ in knowledge-action systems may need reconceptualisation as a shared accomplishment rather than an individual achievement, and consider the role of the knowledge broker, a framing that traditional evaluation metrics struggle to accommodate38. Nonetheless, to be honest– if applied, action orientated work is what I and other boundary spanners I admire (see my fellow authors above) are trying to generate - personal recognition is not the driver. It is the ability to meaningfully contribute to genuine impact in the real world, so it is only when annual reviews come around and you need to articulate this in a skewed metrics systems that this issue arises, especially when it comes to multi-authored papers.

Frontiers in boundary spanning for climate actions in cities

The importance of cultivating an effective exchange between climate change science, policy and practice is critical to climate action. Through four tales of boundary spanning stories, this perspective piece unpacks alternative conceptual framings of boundary spanning practice, revealing contextual barriers and opportunities and different practice models for integrated climate actions between academia and practice. The emergence of spatial metaphors to describe these concepts across the actors also indicates a potential topic for future study that could draw on the existing research exploring the role of metaphors in responding to environmental challenges39. These critical reflections can be discussed on two strata – how conceptual frames are (re)constructed and operationalised by boundary spanners, and how these frames expose specific challenges and potentials within boundary work that inform roles and practice models. Speculating that this process of situating and concept forming - depending on the relationality of each actors’ position within and between organisations - is itself an enabler of boundary spanning practice, this perspective paper offers important practice-based insights in advancing boundary theories.

Across the various tales and boundary spanning experiences, it emerged that there is a greater heterogeneity of boundary spanning roles and practice models that are underpinned by a range of concepts as well as metaphors than previously articulated in the literature. We discuss the key frontiers identified through these shared stories by highlighting the roles and conceptual frames that emerged through these tales, and the frontiers in boundary spanning when applied to practice. These are summarised in Table 1, and discussed below.

  • Where boundary spanning is understood as being an influencer and leader in multiple knowledge universes (tale 1), practices of leading can mean making connections, but also ‘burning bridges’, and discarding trajectories that are no longer useful, highlighting the need for the boundary spanner to learn from failures and identify and project new edges for action. Burning down old bridges can mean changing laws, transcending formal organisational structures and regulations; bringing new (often previously excluded) players to the table to disrupt old power dynamics; and generating new evidence to challenge existing approaches to climate actions.

  • When boundary spanning is conceived within a web of relations and networks (tale 2), the boundary spanner is seen as a shifting actor navigating the messy middle, or as Pelling et al.40 puts it, the shadow spaces, where they consciously switch roles “to experiment, imitate, communicate, learn and reflect on their actions in ways that surpass formal processes within policy and organisational settings.” This enables scanning for ‘blind spots’ and creating new coalescences for effective climate actions, but may require going beyond unwritten rules at times and embracing frictions.

  • The boundary spanner as a rhizomic entity (tale 3), proposes ways of acting in a horizonal manner between different organisational types, as well as across communities, revealing that barriers may not be at the boundary but in the internal organisations of different institutions. Navigating these barriers can mean funnelling knowledge and resources towards supporting community grassroots, moving towards ‘connective professionalism’20. Across the literature there is limited recognition of the boundary role central to science- community partnerships for climate actions through equitable collaboration.

  • The boundary spanner as a critical but somewhat invisible influencer (tale 4) highlights the difficulty in demonstrating specific impact. Posner and Cvitanovic15 argue that measuring this impact is a challenging prospect because it ‘occurs in complex social-ecological systems; involve subtle, gradual, and difficult-to-track changes; and elude conventional evaluation methods that fail to capture the complexity of real-world science and decision-making contexts.’ As Reed et al.41 contend, this may require developing “contribution analysis” approaches that map causal pathways while acknowledging the probabilistic and contextual nature of boundary spanners’ influence on complex urban systems. The intrinsic motivations of boundary spanners in making a difference through action-oriented work often overshadow the need for personal recognition, but this highlights a frontier in boundary research for developing alternative impact metrics that capture contributions.

Table 1 Frontiers in boundary spanning for climate action in practice - emerging concepts, practice challenges and levers
Full size table

While we do not advocate that all civil servants who work in the climate action space should be boundary spanners, we argue that the role and impact of bridging actors should be acknowledged and supported. We see the main contribution of this piece as sharing alternative conceptual frames supported by metaphors that enable boundary spanners to frame and validate their work in the ‘messy’ and complex ecosystem enabling transformative climate actions. We acknowledge that while these shared stories may be context-specific and personal, they reveal the importance of positionality and creating the space for reflection-in-action and sharing practice-based knowledge within a discourse dominated by theoretical groundings.

These boundary actors can be change agents if given a safe space, a clear mandate, and a voice to challenge the status quo and show pockets of plausible futures, of climate-responsive cities and how to get there.