The NATURVATION-inspired Special Issue on the governance of nature-based solutions in the city at the intersection of justice and equity has now been published!

On the one hand the Special Issue provides a diagnosis of the justice implications embedded in recent efforts to renature cities. Placed in the breadth of existing scholarship, it aims to explore the type of socio-environmental contradictions and contestations emerging through the deployment of nature-based solutions in a range of geographies. On the other hand, this Special Issue works towards shaping a prognosis, or a potential future for the governance of nature-based solutions, that brings social justice, indigenous knowledge and more-than-human thinking into the design and execution of projects on nature-based solutions.

More generally, this Special Issue contributes to the growing literature in critical urban geography, planning and ecology on how different types of ‘natures’ are deployed and instrumentalized to defend dominant economic representations. Yet, for nature-based solutions to truly stand up to their promise, the logic and apparatus of urban development need to be decoupled from the ‘growth-at-all-costs’ mental cage by exploring degrowth narratives, for example as only then can environmental justice in its various manifestations be sought, defended and unfolded.