Power, participation, and the politics of Nature-based Solutions: getting transformation right

A recent paper by social scientists at The Agile Initiative, Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Nature-based Solutions Initiative reminds us that new science, improved metrics, and boosting private finance solely are unlikely to be resilient in the long term unless we address the root causes of power inequality and injustice. June 16, 2025

Written by Dr Caitlin Hafferty

When governments, businesses, charities and scientists alike talk about halting biodiversity loss and tackling climate change through Nature-based Solutions (NbS), the focus is often on new science, improved metrics, and boosting private finance. A recent paper by social scientists at The Agile Initiative, Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Nature-based Solutions Initiative reminds us that these fixes are unlikely to be resilient in the long term unless we address the root causes of power inequality and injustice. This involves facing the more fundamental questions: who decides, whose knowledge counts, who benefits and who loses out?

Underlying power issues still shape Nature-based Solutions

• Techno-market dominance: Carbon credits and biodiversity units make projects legible to finance, but an over-reliance on measurable, profit-driven metrics can sideline less quantifiable socio-cultural values. This can also relegate social objectives to “co-benefits” or “spin-offs” to ecosystem services, narrowing how landscapes are valued and elevating external expertise over local knowledge.
• Control as a response to risk: When investors require predictable returns, projects often prioritise centralised landownership and decision-making. Multi-stakeholder, collaborative and community-led models can be considered “too risky”, overly complex, and uncertain, which can end up reinforcing patterns of inequality.
• Democracy washing: Community engagement is frequently reduced to information campaigns that increase “buy-in” and “get people on board”. Participation becomes a tool for consensus rather than a space for genuine contestation, masking rather than challenging power imbalances.

If these underlying tensions are not explicitly acknowledged, then NbS can end up just treating the symptoms of climate change and nature’s decline while the structural causes – concentrated landownership and decision-making structures, power and wealth inequality, and people’s disconnection from nature – remain overlooked or even exacerbated.

Transformation is political by definition

Research on socio-ecological “transformations” shows that they emerge through conflict, not in spite of it. If funding requirements or governance structures close down space for conflict, debate, and uncertainty, then truly transformative NbS – rooted in plural knowledge and messy, discontinuous political conflict – will ultimately fail to gain traction. This is important to ensure that efforts to address biodiversity loss and climate change are not inadvertently turning a blind eye to the underlying causes of these challenges in the first place – power imbalances and inequality.

Balance, not backlash, against techno-science and markets

This doesn’t mean that we don’t need better science, technology, and financial mechanisms. Top-down, techno-scientific and market instruments can all play an important role, but only when they sit alongside (rather than overshadow) processes that are grounded in equity and social justice.

Efforts to align financial imperatives with justice show that it is both possible and necessary to combine financial viability with inclusive, place-based governance. The recent WWF report “Balancing Bankability and Integrity in NbS” explores this challenge, setting out it is both possible and necessary to combine financial viability with justice, human rights, and inclusive, place-based governance. The report highlights four key tensions: short-term returns versus long-term ecological and community gains; profit-driven metrics versus vital but less measurable social values; investor demand for certainty versus the participatory, adaptive governance that NbS require; and incentives that often shift inequal risk onto local communities. The report’s case studies show that blended finance, long-term thinking for investment, and clear social safeguards can help deliver well-designed NbS that are both profitable and transformational. The problem is therefore not in leveraging private finance, using market tools, or applying robust scientific frameworks, but allowing them to crowd out the social and political dimensions that make NbS resilient and ‘just’.

Global recognition of the need for systemic change

The 2025 IPBES Transformative Change Assessment report emphasises why power matters at the international level. It identifies three underlying drivers of biodiversity loss:

• The concentration of power and wealth
• The prioritisation of short-term individual and material gains
• Persistent relations of domination over nature and people – often traced back to colonial histories and sustained by today’s dominant governance and economic models.

These structural issues shape who makes decisions, whose knowledge counts, who benefits or bears the costs of environmental action. As IPBES warns, most current approaches fail because they aim to essentially tweak the system without challenging the forces that uphold it. To truly address nature’s decline in transformative ways, then, we must reckon with the political and institutional arrangements that produce and perpetuate it.

(Re)centring power in practice

• Understand conflict as productive, not a hindrance. Support genuinely open, deliberative, and even agonistic spaces where disagreement is expected rather than avoided, in recognition that friction and trade-offs spark innovation and new opportunities for collaboration.
• Diversify land and finance models. Co-operative ownership, community shares, and more flexible funding models that prioritise long-term thinking and value benefits that can’t always be priced and yet still matter for justice and resilience.
• Treat participation as co-creation, not “buy-in”. Move beyond consultations and information provision to mechanisms that give communities veto rights, control over land and financial resources, and genuine stewardship roles.
• Embrace plural metrics. Include place-based cultural, wellbeing, and justice indicators as well as carbon and biodiversity metrics – even if they don’t fit neatly into quantifiable, profit-driven models.

What this means

• Researchers should not just prioritise efforts to test and enhance NbS effectiveness, but make sure that equal priority is given to unpacking whose knowledge is legitimised, who is considered authoritative in making decisions, and how power can be redistributed in NbS projects.
• Practitioners can closely audit their own governance models: who owns the land? Who provides funding and writes budgets? Who defines and evaluates success? Who directly benefits from projects? Who can say no or suggest an alternative approach?
• Policymakers can incentivise equitable land tenure and inclusive finance structures, including those that are more flexible, embrace uncertainty and long-term thinking, and require demonstrable community agency – not just consultation – a condition of public funding or credit issuance.

Taking all of this into account, action on climate, biodiversity, and human wellbeing must be re-politicised. Until NbS deliberately work to redistribute power – including diversifying land, funding, and knowledge systems – then this risks overlooking the underlying causes of sustainability crises. To be truly transformative, NbS proponents must explicitly recognise these power inequalities and commit to cultivate and open up – rather than control and close down – alternative perspectives, pathways, and possibilities that foster human-ecological justice and flourishing.

Read the full paper: Hafferty, C., Tomude, E.S., Wagner, A., McDermott, C. and Hirons, M., 2025. Unpacking the politics of Nature-based Solutions governance: Making space for transformative change. Environmental Science & Policy, 163, p.103979.