Stakeholder Mapping to Co-Create Nature-Based Solutions: Who Is on Board?

Abstract

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are inspired and supported by nature but designed by humans. Historically, governmental stakeholders have aimed to control nature using a top-down approach; more recently, environmental governance has shifted to collaborative planning. Polycentric governance and co-creation procedures, which include a large spectrum of stakeholders, are assumed to be more effective in the management of public goods than traditional approaches. In this context, NBS projects should benefit from strong collaborative governance models, and the European Union is facilitating and encouraging such models. While some theoretical approaches exist, setting-up the NBS co-creation process (namely co-design and co-implementation) currently relies mostly on self-organized stakeholders rather than on strategic decisions. As such, systematic methods to identify relevant stakeholders seem to be crucial to enable higher planning efficiency, reduce bottlenecks and time needed for planning, designing, and implementing NBS. In this context, this contribution is based on the analysis of 16 NBS and 359 stakeholders. Real-life constellations are compared to theoretical typologies, and a systematic stakeholder mapping method to support co-creation is presented. Rather than making one-fit-all statements about the “right” stakeholders, the contribution provides insights for those “in charge” to strategically consider who might be involved at each stage of the NBS project.

Public Acceptance of Nature-Based Solutions for Natural Hazard Risk Reduction: Survey Findings From Three Study Sites in Europe

“…Phrases such as "integration of local stakeholder knowledge," "bottom-up approach," and any number of verbs following the prefix "co-," to describe public actions within risk management projects are commonplace. The ubiquity of this terminology is indicative of the shift towards increased reliance on public support (i.e., non-state actors and individuals) (Mees et al, 2012;Penning-Rowsell and Johnson 2015;Bubeck et al, 2017;Begg et al, 2018;Kuhlicke et al, 2020;Zingraff-Hamed et al, 2020;Puskás et al, 2021) that has also been codified in relevant policy such as the European Water Framework Directive (European Commission 2000). Indeed, this shift has been most prominently manifested in the context of flood risk management in Europe (Begg et al, 2011;Begg et al, 2018;Bark et al, 2021) and promoted as a departure from a "decide, announce, defend" practitioner-public interaction model to an "engage, deliberate, decide" approach (Daly et al, 2015).…”

“…Indeed, this shift has been most prominently manifested in the context of flood risk management in Europe (Begg et al, 2011;Begg et al, 2018;Bark et al, 2021) and promoted as a departure from a "decide, announce, defend" practitioner-public interaction model to an "engage, deliberate, decide" approach (Daly et al, 2015). An increasing reliance on the public for addressing environmental risk has been attributed to, among other reasons, a decline in trust in policy-makers (van der Vegt 2018), a push for increased legitimacy and democratic decision-making, a recognition of improved outcomes (Begg et al, 2018;Zingraff-Hamed et al, 2020), the ability to break gridlock and prevent litigation (Irvin and Stansbury 2004), and the extra burden on disaster risk managers due to climate change and land-use conflict (Wamsler et al, 2019).…”

“…We focus on Eco-DRR NbS in this study. The substantial funding for NbS research and its ongoing implementation across Europe is indicative of the increasing political and scientific consensus for these measures (Faivre et al, 2017;Zingraff-Hamed et al, 2020;European Commission 2021).…”

Catalyzing Innovation: Governance Enablers of Nature-Based Solutions

“…Once the idea of the Isar-Plan was launched in 1987 at an expert colloquium organized by the City Council to discuss the different options for the future Isar [68], several factors proved key for enabling its subsequent planning, design, and implementation. The Munich Water Agency and representatives from the Munich municipality were in the vanguard of participatory co-design by actively engaging environmental NGOs, residents, and other stakeholders in its planning [35,69]. While the importance of stakeholder engagement in NBS design and implementation is increasingly recognized (e.g., [4,70]), it was much less common when the Isar-Plan was launched.…”

Human–River Encounter Sites: Looking for Harmony between Humans and Nature in Cities

“…Interactive collaborative processes, such as living laboratories, are becoming more popular and enable the inclusion of all relevant stakeholders into the planning process [103][104][105]. The process of the co-design of a solution by a network of private, governmental, technical, and scientific partners enables the creation, prototyping, validating, and testing of new technologies, services, products, and systems in real-life contexts [106].…”