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Failure to address the climate and biodiversity crises is undermining human well-being and increasing global inequality. Given their potential for addressing these societal challenges, there is growing attention on scaling-up nature-based solutions (NbS). However, there are concerns that in its use, the NbS concept is dissociated with the social and economic drivers of these societal challenges, including the pervasive focus on market-based mechanisms and the economic growth imperative, promoting the risk of greenwashing. In this perspective, we draw on recent research on the effectiveness, governance, and practice of NbS to highlight key limitations and pitfalls of a narrow focus on natural capital markets to finance their scaling up. We discuss the need for a simultaneous push for complementary funding mechanisms and examine how financial instruments and market-based mechanisms, while important to bridge the biodiversity funding gap and reduce reliance on public funding, are not a panacea for scaling NbS. Moreover, market-based mechanisms present significant governance challenges, and risk further entrenching power asymmetries. We propose four key recommendations to ensure finance mechanisms for biodiversity and NbS foster more just, equitable, and environmentally sustainable pathways in support of the CBD’s (Convention on Biological Diversity) 2050 vision of “living in harmony with nature”. We stress that NbS must not be used to distract attention away from reducing emissions associated with fossil fuel use or to promote an agenda for perpetual economic growth and call on government policy makers to decenter GDP growth as a core economic and political target, refocusing instead on human and ecological well-being.

Tracing the story of beaver restoration across California, this paper investigates the emerging discourse of ‘working with nature’ through the lens of animal work and labour, exploring possibilities for, multispecies collaboration. At the intersection of animal geographies, environmental anthropology, and geographies of conservation, this paper finds three concurrent modes of working with beaver: beaver as labourer, beaver as coworker, and beaver as community. Beaver as labourer emerges as a mode where beavers go from material resource to low‐wage labourer, their liveliness predicated on their ability to be working for humans. Beaver as coworker transitions beavers from labourers to workers, respected for their skills as ecosystem engineers to be working with. Beaver as community emerges as a mode in which beavers and humans live with each other as kin, amidst wider multispecies assemblages. This mode sets the foundation to theorise the concept of multispecies collaboration, a term often used in the literature without definition. This paper explores the concept through theories of animal work and labour, challenging the premise of work altogether, while situating multispecies collaboration as an in‐between, a both/and space of working and living with ‘nature’. This paper serves as an reflection on the ways in which humans ‘work with nature’, in a time where various nonhumans are being made to be ‘workers’. It presents and analyses these relations, ruminates on implications for governance of these multispecies spaces, and develops the concept of multispecies collaboration as a critical consideration for Nature‐based Solutions.

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