Co-Creation process indicators of nature-based solutions: a deducted assessment methodology for stakeholders’ engagement in CLEVER Front runner Cities

Since 2018, the CLEVER Cities project has put in place an inclusive co-creation pathway that aims at engaging stakeholders (in particular citizens, civil society, public and private stakeholders) in decision-making processes for Nature-based Solutions (NBS) within large-scale urban regeneration projects. The scope of this research is to highlight the importance of conducting an evaluation for co-creation as an added value from the actual implementation of NBS in the collaborative environment of “CLEVER Action Labs” (CALs). Hence, a systematic approach to gather information on each city’s pathway along the co-creation process was developed in order to evaluate: 1) commitment to the process and defining/refining the set of indicators, 2) realistic and relative impacts from the project implementation, and 3) added value to the project in terms of the validation of the co-creation process itself. Within the context of Urban Innovation Partnerships (UIP)[i], different workshops and surveys were used to gather opinions and feedback from cities’ leaders and co-creation facilitators’ teams on the possible criteria of assessment from March 2020 onwards utilizing a reflexive method. Three sets of indicators mainly prioritizing 1) stakeholders’ engagement, 2) shared governance and 3) co-design activities were selected. A learning by doing approach was adopted to structure the results from the framework implementation based on two categories of qualitative and quantitative indicators: procedural indicators (looking at the quality of the process itself in achieving its goals) and impact indicators (that address the expected impacts/results from the co-creation activities). From the workshops with cities in concurrent timeline with the project co-creation processes, two sessions were held to validate the results from the surveys and the previous analysis based on cities exchanges. Two main categories are transversally embedded for measurement: Stakeholders engagement and Shared governance process within the two first project phases of partnership establishment and co-design. The measurements in these two categories are meant to be reflecting the overall co-creation process in the FR Cities and are not entailed to a specific phase (it could happen on a UIP scale or a CAL scale – any scale more detailed than that should be aggregated). The first column (categories) refers to Macro areas of interest such as 1) Stakeholder engagement, 2) Shared governance model and 3) Co-creation pathway (co-design phase so far). Each city evaluation impact is translated into a score board to assess its own co-creation pathway performance; there is no pre-defined success or failure threshold. The general idea is to set a baseline for possible co-creation set of Key performance indicators towards a possible future verification and validation of the methodological framework. The concept behind this methodological approach is not to compare between what “happened” throughout co-creation experiences in the Front Runners of CLEVER Cities, but rather to understand what added value co-creation can have in advancing shared governance models. The analysis will highlight evidence-base from a possible co-creation assessment methodology that takes benefits from the Front Runners’ cities experiences. [i] The UIP is the local public private partnership cluster of actors and stakeholders that carry out the implementation of the project in the local context of each city.