Social engagement in innovation for human-environmental futures: a brief reflexive sight for nature-based solutions projects

• Autor(es): Pereira, Cláudia ; Araújo, Emília Rodrigues ; Teixeira, Elisabete Rodrigues ; Urze, Paula
• Data: 2025
• Identificador Persistente: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/95811
• Origem: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Tipo de Documento: Capitulo
• Idioma: Inglês
• Contribuidor(es): Universidade do Minho

Descrição

Contemporary political and scientific discourses strongly emphasise issues related to the construction, communication, and contestation of the future. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) represent high-impact social innovations aimed at reshaping practices and enhancing the resilience of infrastructures and populations through natural solutions. This chapter revisits the primary objectives of NBS and discusses the significance of social engagement in NBS creation, implementation, and maintenance to elevate both the level and quality of social participation in future endeavors. Therefore, it addresses key aspects of the social engagement process, including stakeholder definition, methodologies in use, and the relationship between participation and innovation within the context of NBS design. A narrative analysis of part of the existing literature focused on engagement and NBS, allow us to conclude that social engagement in NBS projects contributes to the design of democratic futures and can be further enhanced through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary efforts, as well as the inclusion of memory and history-related information throughout the process. Deeper intertwining between social participation approaches and open innovation frameworks from the outset can lead to more sustainable outcomes for thinking about how to build in practice resilient societies.