Nature-based Solutions on privately owned land: Stakeholder engagement matters

To tackle hydrometeorological extreme events and adapt to climate change, Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are widely considered a promising approach. Yet, their implementation remains challenging. One key reason is that NbS require a lot more land than grey infrastructure – making their implementation dependent on privately owned land and prone to cause or exacerbate conflicts of interest over land use. This request of privately owned land widens the numbers of actors involved in the decision-making process. For this very reason, the realisation of NbS highlights the necessity of meaningful stakeholder engagement. However, in the past, technical mitigation measures were traditionally enforced top down by engineers within the public administration at national or regional level. Stakeholder engagement thus fundamentally changes the way how risk managers and citizens collaborate and is often reported to not live up to its expectations. Therefore, this study will address the role of stakeholder engagement as a decisive factor for the implementation of NbS on privately owned land. More specifically, it aims (i) to analyse what approaches to stakeholder engagement are currently employed on the side of flood risk authorities and (ii) to evaluate how stakeholder engagement processes account for conflicts of interest over land use. For this purpose, a qualitative research design approach will be exerted. This will involve desk research to identify areas in Austria where NbS on privately owned land have already been (and will be) implemented, semi-structured interviews with public water authorities and workshops in our case study site – the Lafnitz catchment in Austria. Lessons learnt will be compared with those of five other regions across Europe, as our study is embedded in the EU Horizon Project “Land4Climate” (Utilization of private land for mainstreaming Nature-based Solutions in the systemic transformation towards a climate-resilient Europe, HORIZON-MISS-2022-CLIMA-01-06). By doing so, our research will provide hands-on knowledge on NbS implementation and foster its mainstreaming across the European Union.