Format/Structure

The session will consist of papers presentations discussed by convenors.

Long Abstract

Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) have rapidly emerged as influential concepts shaping climate and biodiversity governance, embraced by governments, multilateral organizations, and private actors. Promoted as responses to societal challenges through nature-inspired practices, NbS have become hegemonic in science and policy. Yet, their proliferation and the narratives surrounding them often reproduce socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and racial injustices, green dispossession, and speculative development—especially in marginalized urban and rural communities—while frequently falling short of deeper ecological needs. This panel invites contributions from a variety of methodologies and fields that critically interrogate the dominant logics, narratives, institutional arrangements, and material effects of NbS across diverse geographies. We ask: To what extent do NbS narratives represent genuine conceptual innovations in climate and biodiversity governance? Do they open emancipatory avenues or reinforce existing relations of power and control over resources, land, and communities? Where do narratives of environmental justice fit in these emerging framings?

Building on critical political ecology and environmental justice scholarship, we seek both theoretical and empirical papers that highlight how NbS shape and are shaped by power dynamics, from the Global North to the Global South, and across urban and rural contexts. We particularly welcome grounded critiques and transformative alternatives—what we call nature-inspired justice—anchored in decolonial, feminist, and redistributional principles. Contributions may foreground the struggles, practices, and policies of ecologically and socially vulnerable communities, the workers who sustain them, and the species at the center of NbS projects.

This Panel has 16 pending paper proposals.
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