Guidelines for Co-Creation and Co-Governance of Nature-based Solutions: Insights from EU-funded Projects

Nature-based Solutions (NBS) are essential instruments in our toolkit to tackle major societal challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. But they also have the potential to contribute to and accelerate the transformative change that will bring about a climate-neutral, sustainable, and equitable future as imagined by the European Green Deal. However, the success of NBS interventions lies in their ability to consider local culture and conditions, to respond to the needs of the community where they are embedded and to distribute benefits fairly across population segments. It also depends on the buy-in of that community. That is why the design, implementation, maintenance, and monitoring of NBS need to involve and empower that community, ensure ownership and stewardship, which in turn translate into long-term environmental, economic and social viability of the intervention. In this context, co-creation, and co-governance — the two cornerstones of this publication — become central to the effective deployment of NBS in different settings. Evidence suggests that co-creation is a key catalyst for social change, which also underscores the relevance of NBS processes and interventions in changing our relationship with nature while bringing it back into our lives. The European Commission has also made the role of co-creation essential in its guidelines and toolkit for Urban Greening Plans1 to which some of the authors of this report contributed as well. This report offers practitioners, decision makers, researchers and other experts’ guidelines and approaches to co-designing, co-developing, co-implementing and co-monitoring NBS for environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable NBS. The guidelines added value lies in proposing co-creation and co-governance pathways built on the experience of tailoring them to different contexts, spatial scales and timelines in several EU-funded research and innovation projects. The document gives valuable insights in specific cases and success stories, for instance, how some cities have overcome, with co-governance, the most challenging aspects of governance silos and ensured extensive citizen engagement.