Learning session 12: Beyond Nature-based Solutions
Online learning sessions using dialogue to explore the workings, developments, (im)possibilities, and emerging insights of diverse approaches and praxes for Co-creation with the More-than-Human world
The 12th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in April 2026 explored Beyond Nature-Based Solutions with two team members of the European COEVOLVERS project: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Professor and Permanent Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University, and Oriana Mosca, social and environmental psychologist at the University of Cagliari.
The session examined what it means to move from nature-based solutions as technical interventions serving human needs toward a co-evolutionary approach in which humans and other species jointly shape the design, maintenance, and governance of shared places. Carsten introduced the theoretical framing behind the COEVOLVERS project - running seven Living Labs across Europe - while Oriana brought the concrete, lived experience of the Molentargius-Saline Regional Natural Park in Cagliari, Italy, where multi-species methods are being developed in practice.
What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.
🌿 Learning Session 12 (April 2026) — Synthesis
Beyond Nature-Based Solutions,with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Oriana Mosca (COEVOLVERS)
What happens when nature-based solutions are no longer primarily designed to solve human problems — but understood as co-evolutionary processes in which humans and other species shape each other, and the solution itself, over time?
1. What is wrong with how nature-based solutions are typically understood?
The technocratic logic
Conventional nature-based solutions follow what Carsten described as a “quasi-technological” logic: humans identify a problem, define a solution, and then harness natural resources and ecosystem services to meet those human-defined needs. Even when participatory methods are used, the frame stays the same: humans are the beneficiaries and designers; nature is the means.
The limits of this in a radically uncertain future
COEVOLVERS starts from the recognition that we are navigating a triple environmental crisis — climate change, biodiversity loss, and social fragility — in which the future is radically uncertain. A nature-based solution designed to deliver specific outcomes today may not be able to sustain those outcomes across the changes ahead. Carsten’s argument is that humans alone cannot find the solutions we need: we need to collaborate with other species to achieve them. That is not a poetic claim — it is a practical one about what co-evolution actually produces.
From solutions to assemblages
This is why COEVOLVERS shifted terminology: from nature-based solutions to nature-based assemblages. The word assemblage — drawn from new materialism and actor-network theory — signals that agency is distributed across humans, non-humans, materials, and systems. What begins as a designed intervention becomes something that co-evolves: unexpected changes take place, new elements enter, and the original design idea is gradually transformed by the process of living with and within it.
🌱 Seed:
The problem with “solution” is in the word itself. It implies a problem that can be definitively resolved, a human who resolves it, and a fixed endpoint. Assemblage keeps the process open — and in doing so, keeps it honest about the complexity it is trying to navigate.
2. What does a co-evolutionary approach actually look like in practice?
Intervention as starting point, not endpoint
In the co-evolutionary framework, an NbS ( = Nature-based Solution) intervention — say, a healing garden in a hospital, or a wildfire buffer using sheep — is a starting point, not a finished design. Once implemented, it is expected to co-evolve: humans observe what happens, other species respond and adapt, and the arrangement changes accordingly. Human designers give up exclusive control of the process and enter a genuine learning relationship with the site and its non-human inhabitants.
Transdisciplinary learning — extended to other species
Co-evolutionary NbS is also a transdisciplinary learning process, but one that extends beyond the usual understanding of transdisciplinarity (which typically means engaging diverse human stakeholders). COEVOLVERS adds the idea of including other species as genuine partners in that learning — not as passive objects of study, but as participants whose responses, movements, and presences shape what the assemblage becomes.
The seven Living Labs
COEVOLVERS is developing this approach across seven Living Labs in Finland, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Scotland, Hungary, and Estonia. As Carsten noted, only two of the labs are implementing nature-based solutions in a narrow technical sense (a healing garden and a wildfire management project using sheep and goats). The others — including Cagliari — are community-based and multidimensional, working at the intersection of ecological and social transformation.
🌱 Seed:
Co-evolutionary NbS requires a different relationship to uncertainty: not trying to engineer it out, but learning to design in ways that open up possibilities for co-evolution rather than foreclosing them. The starting point matters, but so does the willingness to be changed by what follows.
3. What does it mean to treat an NbS as an artwork — and why does this matter?
Moving from causal to aesthetic principles
One of COEVOLVERS’ central conceptual moves is to argue that the design and maintenance of nature-based assemblages should be guided not only by linear, science-based notions of causality — if we do X, Y will result — but by aesthetic principles. Carsten’s formulation: NbS as artwork. This does not mean making something beautiful. It means designing in a way that opens up affordances — possibilities for action and interaction — for other species to enter and participate in the assemblage.
Affordances and the creation of possibility space
Affordance, in this context, means what an environment makes possible for a given species: whether it invites a bird to nest, a person to linger, an insect to forage. What ecological data and metrics measure is the current state of affairs — what has already happened. What an aesthetic approach adds is the creation of a possibility space: designing arrangements that invite forms of life and relationship that could not have been predicted in advance. These two are complementary, not competing.
Art-based methods as integral, not decorative
This reframing also changes the role of art-based methods in NbS practice. Typically, these methods — sound mapping, sensory walks, participatory observation, storytelling — are used in early stages to build community awareness and engagement. COEVOLVERS argues that they should become integral to the ongoing management of the assemblage: deployed continuously, not just at the beginning. They are not communication tools; they are governance tools.
🌱 Seed:
Treating NbS as artwork is a claim about what kind of intelligence is needed to sustain multispecies communities over time: not only the intelligence of ecological science, but the intelligence of perception, attentiveness, and relational response. Both are necessary; neither is sufficient alone.
4. What is “embodied reciprocity” — and how is it different from abstract commitments to biodiversity?
The problem with abstract reciprocity
Most governance frameworks for NbS include a requirement that interventions should contribute to biodiversity. Carsten named this as a form of abstract reciprocity: a quantitative, aggregate criterion assessed after the fact — biodiversity indicators have improved over five years — and that bears no necessary relationship to what happens on the ground, in concrete interactions between specific humans and specific other species.
Embodied reciprocity as the alternative
Embodied reciprocity, by contrast, means that there is real exchange on the ground: concrete other species who actually benefit from the nature-based assemblage, not only in the statistical aggregate but in ways that are perceptible, located, and ongoing. This requires designing not just for ecosystem services but for relationship — for the kinds of repeated, sensory, attentive interactions between humans and non-humans through which care actually develops.
Silvio the pelican
Oriana offered a vivid instance from Molentargius: Silvio, a solitary pelican who arrived in the park during migration and stayed. Silvio is not a managed or planned element of the Living Lab. He simply appeared, became known to park visitors and staff, acquired a name, and became part of the storytelling of the place. People track his movements through the park — not exploitatively, but with respectful attention and affection. As Oriana noted, charismatic wildlife like Silvio can play an essential role in the environmental meaning-making of a place, becoming an unexpected advocate for greater emphasis on aesthetic, relational approaches to NbS.
🌱 Seed:
Abstract biodiversity commitments can coexist with the complete absence of genuine relationship between humans and other species. Embodied reciprocity asks for something more specific and more demanding: that other species are actually present, known, and cared for in the lived texture of a place.
5. What is the aesthetics of care — and how does it connect to governance?
Saito’s framework
COEVOLVERS draws on the philosopher Yuriko Saito’s concept of the aesthetics of care — the idea that aesthetic experience and ethical commitment are not separate domains but woven together in how we actually attend to, perceive, and inhabit shared space. Care is not only a moral attitude arrived at through reasoning; it is an embodied, sensory, relational practice that shows up in how we engage with the world around us.
Sensory governance — the material arrangement as governance mechanism
Carsten extended this into governance: if the goal is to cultivate forms of embodied reciprocity between humans and other species, then the material arrangement of a nature-based assemblage must itself become a governance mechanism. Drawing on concepts from environmental psychology (environmental cues, grounding normative commitments) and behavioural economics (nudging), he described what the literature calls “sensory governance” — governance through the shape, texture, and materiality of the place itself, designed to induce care-full behaviour rather than relying solely on rules and regulations.
Learning new aesthetic preferences
This is more than making things beautiful so that people feel positive emotions. As Carsten was careful to note, that would be “extremely naive.” The deeper claim is that certain material arrangements — designed with attentiveness to what affords relationship and care — can induce behaviours of care-full engagement with other species. This also requires a learning process: humans, including different groups with very different starting points, must develop new aesthetic preferences and sensory attunements over time.
🌱 Seed:
Sensory governance is governance through encounter: designing places in ways that make care not just possible but natural, not just encouraged but felt. The challenge is that this requires changing not only institutions but perceptions — and that is a long, practice-based, and fundamentally relational process.
6. Can including other species actually reduce human conflict in NbS projects?
The conflict problem in conventional NbS
One of the practical limitations of conventional nature-based solutions is that they tend to become contentious precisely because they serve human interests — and human stakeholders disagree about whose interests, and how. When different human groups have conflicting views about what a place should be for, NbS becomes a political battleground, and financial sustainability suffers.
Multi-species framing as a partial buffer
Oriana offered a hypothesis — developed in conversation with Carsten shortly before the session — that including other species, particularly vulnerable or endangered ones, might help to restructure the dynamics of human conflict. The reasoning: humans have a natural aptitude for biophilia; we are born with the capacity for care toward other living beings. When the frame shifts from “which humans benefit?” to “how do we cooperate to care for these species?”, it may temporarily reorganise human groups around a higher-level shared goal. This does not eliminate conflict, but it creates a different kind of social field — one oriented toward cooperation rather than competition over human interests.
Vulnerability as a point of alignment
Carsten added a related observation: there are often structural alignments between the vulnerabilities of marginalised human groups and those of other species. Groups who have been excluded from conventional participatory processes may share interests with species who have been excluded from conventional governance frameworks. Recognising and mobilising these alignments — making them visible as stakeholder coalitions — can open up new possibilities for both human and more-than-human inclusion.
🌱 Seed:
Multi-species framing is not a way of avoiding the political. It is a way of reorganising it — offering a different ground on which human groups might find common cause. That is a fragile and contested possibility, not a guaranteed outcome, but one worth taking seriously.
7. What do practitioners need to learn — and what might they need to unlearn?
Extending, not replacing, participatory methods
The question came up whether practitioners already skilled in human participatory methods — community engagement, co-design, stakeholder consultation — need to unlearn those methods to work in a co-evolutionary frame. Carsten’s answer: probably not unlearning, but extending. The same participatory tools can be adapted to include other species — for example, role-play approaches where participants take on the perspective of a bird or an insect, or ecopolicy simulations where species are given a seat in decision-making. This induces a learning process toward greater inclusivity without requiring practitioners to abandon their existing toolkit.
The harder ask: cultivating attentiveness over time
What is genuinely new — and genuinely demanding — is the cultivation of a different quality of presence in the field. Oriana described this in terms of sustained observation: spending real time in the park, doing guided observation grids, developing perceptual sensitivity to soundscapes, soils, and movement. This is not a skill that practitioners typically develop in conventional NbS work. Sound mapping, affordance mapping, mindfulness practices in the park — these are the methods through which that attentiveness is built, and they require sustained engagement, not one-off workshops.
Legitimacy is not the only barrier
The session poll asked whether most NbS practitioners already sense what a place needs but just lack the language, tools, and legitimacy to act on it. Most participants responded somewhere in the middle — not strongly agreeing. The implication is significant: the challenge is not only one of legitimacy and language. There is also a deeper question of readiness and cultivated attentiveness that cannot be resolved simply by changing institutional permissions.
🌱 Seed:
Extending participatory methods to include other species is a meaningful step. But it is not sufficient alone. What is also needed is the development of a different quality of perceptual relationship with specific places and their non-human inhabitants — and that takes time, practice, and genuine presence in the field.
8. What is the role of rituals, indigenous wisdom, and non-indigenous translation?
Rituals as aesthetic practice for sustaining relationship
Carsten pointed to ritual as one of the most important and underexplored aesthetic practices for sustaining NbS over time. Seasonal rituals, place-based practices, collective ceremonies that engage people with a green space beyond its instrumental uses — these are ways of building and renewing relationship with place and its non-human inhabitants across longer timescales. They create the kind of repeated, embodied engagement that makes care a lived practice rather than a stated commitment.
The indigenous paradigm as a model — with honesty about the challenge
For indigenous peoples and first nations, ritual practices have sustained relationships with land and other species for centuries. As Carsten acknowledged in response to a question, this is an indispensable model. But the translation into non-indigenous, urban, North European contexts raises a genuine challenge: how do you create ritual practices that are culturally rooted in a context where those roots have been severed or never existed in that form? His answer was not to resolve this but to take it seriously, and to point toward the growing practice of secular, non-religious ritual creation — and to the movement for revived European traditions — as places from which one can learn, without imitating.
🌱 Seed:
Ritual is not a marginal addition to NbS work. It is one of the most powerful technologies we have for sustaining relationship with place and other species across time. Creating it in non-indigenous contexts is a genuine challenge — but it is a challenge worth meeting rather than avoiding.
9. Where does this approach hit the hardest walls — and what might help?
Institutional and regulatory frameworks
A second session poll asked whether current funding and evaluation frameworks make this approach structurally impossible, not just difficult. The majority of participants agreed strongly. Carsten confirmed this from COEVOLVERS’ experience: municipal administrators typically require months if not years of engagement before the value of multi-species perspectives can be accepted. Existing regulatory frameworks in most cities simply do not contain the conceptual infrastructure for nature-based governance. The Cagliari Living Lab, as a protected area with a conservation mandate, operates in a more enabling context than, say, the Tartu Living Lab — where the ambition to build a “multispecies city” faces a regulatory and stakeholder landscape that does not yet support it.
The coalitional gap — and the entrepreneurial opportunity
Carsten’s most pointed observation about hardest walls was that the coalition currently doing this work — researchers, activists, and sympathetic administrators — is too narrow to achieve meaningful scale. Other groups need to join for this to move beyond niche contexts. He pointed, perhaps surprisingly, to the entrepreneurial dimension: entrepreneurs who can find genuine value in biodiversity and multispecies approaches, cities that market themselves as “biodiversity” destinations, businesses that build identities around place-based ecological relationships. These actors may not share the full vision, but they can create momentum, visibility, and financial pathways that make the work more sustainable. Mobilising them requires meeting them where they are — not as a compromise, but as a necessary expansion of the coalition.
🌱 Seed:
The walls are real, but they are not all the same kind of wall. Some are conceptual, some are institutional, and some are coalitional. Each requires a different kind of effort — and none of them can be moved by researchers and activists alone.
Cross-cutting insight threads
From linear design to co-evolutionary process
The deepest reorientation COEVOLVERS proposes is not methodological but temporal: moving from designing a solution and implementing it, to entering an open-ended process of co-evolution with the place and its non-human inhabitants. This changes what success looks like, what governance requires, and what practitioners need to be capable of.
Abstract vs embodied reciprocity
One of the sharpest distinctions in the session was between abstract reciprocity — the kind tracked by aggregate biodiversity indicators assessed after five years — and embodied reciprocity: real exchange, on the ground, between specific humans and specific other species. The latter is harder to measure, harder to govern, and harder to sustain. But it is what genuine co-creation with the more-than-human actually requires.
Art-based methods as governance, not communication
The conventional role of art-based methods in NbS work is awareness-raising and community engagement — something done at the start. COEVOLVERS argues for a different understanding: these methods should be integral to the ongoing governance of the assemblage, continuously cultivating the perceptual attentiveness and relational sensitivity on which embodied reciprocity depends.
The coalitional challenge
The session made clear that the community currently advancing this work is insufficient to achieve the institutionalisation that would make it genuinely transformative. Widening the coalition — including to entrepreneurial actors — is not a compromise of the vision. It may be one of the conditions of its realisation.
Silvio as method
Oriana’s story of Silvio the pelican was small but pointed. A solitary, unplanned bird arrived in a park and became, over time, known and cared for by the community around him. No methodology produced that relationship; sustained presence and attention did. It is a reminder that the most important outcomes of co-evolutionary NbS may not be the ones that were designed for.
Closing
These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.
Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
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