Assessment of Nature-Based Solutions Implementation Practice

Governance of Nature-based Solutions embodies a holistic approach that acknowledges the intrinsic and relational values of nature, aiming to align human activities with ecological systems for sustainable development and long-term well-being. Despite broad applications, there are barriers to NBS’s widespread implementation that hinder its effectiveness and scalability. The objective of this deliverable is to assess current socio-political challenges in NBS design and implementation practice with a special focus on the vulnerability of humans and non-human species, and to create an institutional typology of nature-based governance.  D.4.1. is explorative to provide hermeneutic understanding about the problematic situations in seven LL sites and articulate and form hypotheses or questions for future, broader scale scientific work on the societal, environmental, and institutional conditions of NBS design and implementation. It builds on the study from seven COEVOLVERs LLs’ learning communities in eight European countries (Czech Republic and Slovakia, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, and Scotland) with a completed survey with the general public and interviews with key stakeholders. The study underlined high connectivity to nature in all the LLs, which provided motivation for pro-nature action and highlighted the barriers and benefits in implementing NBS and deriving promising NBS potential for LLs communities, including vulnerable and other than human agencies. This forms the basis for conceptual work on nature-based governance that manifests the interconnection of physical and social domains, concerning vulnerable agencies to include LLs into the co-creation of nature-based governance models and allocating rights to other than human species. The benefit of such governance mode is to address sustainability challenges by working with nature to identify institutional solutions that can tweak the coevolution of institutions and the environment into more sustainable directions.D.4.1. as work in progress will further inform the institutional reconfiguration (D.4.2) and co-creation of nature-based governance models (D.4.3). Furthermore, forthcoming survey under the T.3.4. will complement analyses in measuring attitudes, beliefs and motivations on a broader scale, The survey will also meet the requirements of random sampling and representativeness, and hence it will provide further interpretative support for the D.4.1. survey results.