Presentation short abstract

This study investigates co-management practices at two neighboring lake restoration projects in Bengaluru, India. Using a mixed-methods approach, including focus groups and archival research, this work shows how communities envision and negotiate socio-ecological futures of urban waterbodies.

Presentation long abstract

In rapidly urbanizing Bengaluru, India, efforts to restore the city’s historical lake (kere) network are more than ecological interventions to the city’s water management challenges; they serve as cultural, political, and imaginative projects that reshape relationships among communities, state institutions, and multispecies life. Community leadership is central to these restoration efforts, but there is limited literature on how shared resource governance between communities and the government, or co-management, contributes to socio-ecological transformation.

This research examines two neighboring projects, Benniganahalli and B. Channasandra (Kasturi Nagar), where local communities catalyzed the restoration of degraded waterbodies, partnering with government agencies and undertaking labor of ecological recovery. This study uses a mixed-methods framework, including archival research, qualitative focus groups, comparisons with International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) criteria, and a stakeholder network analysis to capture the situated experiences and tensions embedded in community-led restoration.

The results show that community groups occupy central bridging roles to connect community visions for restoration futures with enabling government agencies. For these communities, the process of restoration extended beyond environmental goals into re-envisioning local public spaces and ecosystem governance practices. Focus group discussions highlighted how co-management forces community groups to navigate political contestation and to negotiate between ecological and economic benefits, government priorities, and social inclusion within lake spaces. These results show the social complexities of restoration and contribute to growing scholarship on participatory governance models, highlighting how co-management can reconfigure not only ecosystems but also the meanings, relations, and governance practices through which urban nature is lived.