Presentation short abstract

Using the idea of capacity-building praxis, the paper shows how co-learning and participatory training create micro-political openings in state-led urban nature governance, reshaping relations, elevating community knowledge, and enabling more inclusive neighbourhood-level stewardship.

Presentation long abstract

Urban political ecology has increasingly turned toward praxis, yet we know little about how such practice-oriented engagements unfold in settings where ecological governance is strongly state-led and technocratic. This paper develops the concept of capacity-building praxis to examine how collaborative training, co-learning, and participatory workshops can operate as political interventions within emerging fields of urban nature governance. Drawing on qualitative research conducted across several cities, the study analyses interactions among governmental officials, community stewards, NGOs, academics, and early-career practitioners involved in shared learning on neighbourhood-level green infrastructure, community gardens, and environmental stewardship. The findings show how capacity-building processes can reconfigure relationships among actors, enhance interpretive authority for community knowledge, and subtly challenge dominant narratives that shape urban environmental policy. Three contributions are offered. First, capacity building is reframed as institutional praxis, shifting the focus from skill transfer to reconfigurations of collaboration, understanding, and decision-making. Second, the paper demonstrates how modest co-learning environments can create micro-political openings within centralised governance regimes, enabling participants to articulate alternative socio-ecological imaginaries of stewardship and multifunctional urban nature. Third, it identifies the structural frictions, including administrative path dependencies, performance-led evaluation cultures, and asymmetries between state and civic actors, that shape the durability of such openings. By conceptualising capacity building as a form of praxis, the paper broadens the repertoire of engaged urban political ecology and illustrates how more inclusive and resilient forms of urban nature governance can be cultivated within and across rapidly urbanising contexts.