Short Abstract

This panel explores how Ecocentric perspectives reshape Nature-Based Solutions in urban resilience interventions, questioning anthropocentric assumptions, technical, transformative and governance knowledges, and the politics of re-greening within future urban transformations.

Description

As Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) gain prominence in global agendas for climate adaptation, biodiversity restoration, and urban resilience, their underlying assumptions and implications deserve critical scrutiny. Too often, NbS are framed through technocratic or anthropocentric logics that value nature for its service to humans, thus reproducing utilitarian and extractivist paradigms. Shifting the focus from “what we know” to “how we know” in fostering urban resilience, we ask how cities can give back to nature through more-than-human forms of care and reciprocity.

We seek to explore how different knowledges (technical, transformative, governance) challenge dominant narratives of control, optimization, and “green growth”, and instead cultivate more reciprocal, care-based, just, and multi-species forms of coexistence. This panel aims to advance theoretical and empirical debates on the re-imagination of NbS through Ecocentric and relational paradigms and move beyond instrumentalist framings toward a more reflexive understanding of urban socio-ecological transformations. Empirical and theoretical contributions may address, for instance (but not limited to), the trade-offs and conflicts involved in re-greening processes; the cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of human–nature relations; or the ways applied NbS projects reconfigure urban metabolisms and socio-ecological assemblages. This panel invites contributions that foreground Ecocentric perspectives in the design, governance, and evaluation of NbS in cities, through grassroots ecological restoration and indigenous-led practices to municipal green infrastructure experiments through a “more than human lens”.

This discussion contributes to Science and Technology Studies by examining how different knowledges mediate the boundary between human and nonhuman actors in sustainability transitions. It also addresses the EASST 2026 streams “Transitions”, “Next Natures” and “Resilience”, by questioning how value, agency, and care of nature are defined, negotiated, and transformed in the pursuit of future resilient cities. In conclusion, this panel contributes to broader discussions on how Ecocentric perspectives can transform NbS in an era of accelerating environmental change.

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