The nature-based solution implementation gap: A review of nature-based solution governance barriers and enablers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nature-based solutions (NbS) represent a critical umbrella concept encompassing measures that employ nature's properties to systemically address societal challenges, potentially providing benefits for biodiversity, climate and people. NbS are accordingly emerging on an ever-expanding number of policy agendas, such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and multiple European Union strategies. However, despite this increasing political traction, NbS implementation (that is, the design, planning, construction, monitoring and maintenance of NbS) remains fragmented and is often too context-specific for their wider upscaling and mainstreaming, creating an ‘NbS implementation gap’ between ambitions and on-the-ground operationalization. Based on a systematic review of grey- and peer-reviewed literature and workshop results (N = 34), we identify and discuss the institutional, legal, regulatory, social and economic enablers (N = 301) and barriers (N = 307) to NbS implementation. Our results highlight the governance factors that currently facilitate or limit NbS implementation and mainstreaming, which are often homologous. These include inclusive stakeholder engagement processes and true co-design; an evidence base on NbS performance and their co-benefits, including quantitative cost-benefit analyses; the existence of or lack of knowledge products and NbS-specific expertise; and available funds earmarked for NbS. We find that polycentric governance arrangements may act as a critical enabler for NbS implementation, yet path dependencies significantly limit NbS by still favouring grey alternatives. By providing an overview of NbS implementation enablers and barriers across literature and workshop findings, this analysis represents a first step towards understanding key pitfalls and leverage points for enhancing NbS implementation and mainstreaming. • A gap exists between ambitions for nature-based solutions and their implementation. • Nature-based solutions' implementation is limited by governance challenges. • Lack of expertise, evidence bases, and stakeholder conflicts hinder their scaling. • Overcoming these unique governance barriers is needed to break grey path dependency. • Co-design, polycentricity, and harmonized guidance can support their wider adoption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".