Connecting Nature Deliverable 5: Nature-based Solutions Framework for Front-runner cities.
Creators: name: Hölscher, Katherina
name: Allaert, Kato
name: Frantzeskaki, Niki
name: Lodder, Marleen
name: Notermans, Igno
name: Sillen, Dan
name: Collier, Marcus J.
name: Connop, Stuart
name: Dick, Gillian
name: Dumitru, Adina
name: Dziubala, Agnieszka
name: Kelly, Sean
name: Madajczyk, Natalia
name: McQuaid, Siobhán
name: Mowatt, Laura
name: Osipiuk, Agnieszka
name: Quartier, Mien
name: Sermpezi, Rania
name: Vandergert, Paula
name: Van De Sijpe, Katrien
name: Vos, Peter
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019
Subjects: Nature-based solutions
Co-creation
Reflexive monitoring
Connecting Nature
Urban
Fast-follower cities
Front-runner cities
Urban transitioning
Connecting Nature Framework

description: This document presents the Nature-based Solutions Framework developed in the Connecting Nature project to support the planning, delivery, and legacy of nature-based solutions on a large scale in cities. The main aim of the framework is to provide a comprehensive standard that informs urban planning and policy practice to scale up urban resilience, innovation, and empowerment via nature-based solutions in cities. The framework facilitates learning by and for cities on how to generate and connect diverse types of (e.g. technical, market, governance, social) innovations engendered by nature-based solutions. In this way, we generate innovation propositions for science and practice for the large-scale implementation of nature-based solutions and for making Europe a global leader in the innovation and implementation of nature-based solutions. Our main premise lies in our understanding of nature-based solutions as ‘living’ sustainability transition experiments. A key challenge is large-scale implementation – or ‘up-scaling’ – of nature-based solutions. This includes, for example, the replication or expansion of demonstration projects or the institutional embedding of new knowledge, skills, and collaboration and financing mechanisms. Scaling nature-based solutions is therefore about more than the individual innovations: it is about how they are connected to each other and to their contexts. This requires new types of processes, partnerships, conditions, skills, and knowledge to allow for multi-actor collaboration and synergies, design fit-to-context nature-based solutions that generate multiple benefits, and ensure early assessment of the transformations brought about in cities. We have co-produced the Nature-based Solutions Framework, its translation to the frontrunner cities, and the derivation of lessons through iterative interaction between researchers and planners of the cities in the Connecting Nature project. This means that we adopted a ‘learning-by-doing’ approach based on science-practice collaboration and cross-disciplinary cooperation. Our aim is to in this way integrate and generate new knowledge and ultimately to translate this knowledge into urban planning and policy frameworks and unlock existing barriers. This document envelops the reports by the frontrunner cities Genk (Belgium), Glasgow (United Kingdom) and Poznań (Poland), which showcase how the cities made use of the framework to implement their nature-based solutions exemplars. It summarises how the cities’ experiences contribute to (connecting) diverse types of innovations for the large-scale nature-based solutions implementation in cities.
description: Suggested citation: Hölscher, K., Allaert, K., Frantzeskaki, N., Lodder, M., Notermans, I., Sillen, D., Collier, M. J., Connop, S., Dick, G., Dumitru, A., Dziubala, A., Kelly, S., Madajczyk, N., McQuaid, S., Mowatt, L., Osipiuk, A., Quartier, M., Sermpezi, R., Vandergert, P., van De Sijpe, K., and Vos, P. (2019). Connecting Nature Deliverable 5: Nature-based Solutions Framework for Front-runner cities. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7442857