Critical reflections upon emerging approaches to citizen engagement for sustainable and just people and nature futures.

Engaging citizens in biodiversity and nature-focused decision-making processes has been limited in scope and design to date. Increasing polarisation is occurring, especially between resource users and environmental activists on questions of biodiversity protection and restoration, while latent support for biodiversity is not well quantified, but appears much higher than publics are aware of. There is extensive experience developing of facilitating living lab approaches to innovation and problem solving, and other dialogic approaches to multi-actor learning are emerging that have a focus on place-based restoration and protection of nature and can inform spatial planning. Such transdisciplinary approaches are complex in practice, and struggle to resolve or overcome power inequalities. We will reflect upon methodological innovations and author's fieldwork experiences in facilitating living labs and social learning processes in contexts of complex power dynamics. Deliberative approaches have been applied more widely to other topics, such as climate change, rather than on biodiversity, nature and societal futures in specific places. A notable exception being the Irish Biodiversity Citizen Assembly. More experimentation is required in deliberation to give space to plural ontologies, epistemologies and practices, as well as increased investment in the evidencing outcomes. Finally, there are newly emerging creative approaches that engage the arts to provoke participants in terms of challenging dominant hegemonic assumptions and thereby to generate rich new future possibilities. Across all these spaces of citizen engagement in decision-making on biodiversity, nature and societal futures in contexts of climate change, the rise of AI creates new possibilities and raises new ethical concerns. This paper offers a typology of citizen engagement approaches, explores a range of cases cutting across these approaches to distil key insights and lessons on justice, power and plurality, and the potential of these deliberative, dialogic and creative approaches to citizen engagement for sustainable nature and people futures. We distil key insights from emerging evidence and outline new directions and challenges including with respect to other-than-human as well as human agency and values.