2529 frequently diverge from these expectations, suggesting that standards alone do not ensure that the social assumptions shaping project Theories of Change are made explicit, tested, or revised in practice. 1.3 The Implementation Gap: NbS as Social Interventions in Practice In practice, many NbS interventions continue to incur significant social costs, particularly in forestbased carbon projects, biodiversity offsets, and protected-area-adjacent initiatives (Olivadese, 2025). REDD+ and BO provide instructive examples. Both mechanisms function by protecting forested areas deemed ecologically equivalent to those cleared or degraded by mining, based on project-level estimates of future deforestation and their respective carbon / biodiversity values. These estimates assume that, in the absence of intervention, such forests would be lost due to human activity. In this way, although offsets within NbS are often framed as technical ecological mechanisms reliant on scientific calculations of biodiversity units or carbon stocks, they are, fundamentally, human projects founded upon the altering of human behaviour. Empirical studies of REDD+ and BO implementation illustrate what this entails in practice, involving the creation of protected forest zones in which local communities are restricted from using land and natural resources. The generation of ecological ‘gains’ is therefore contingent on limiting community access and modifying livelihood practices. In other words, the offsets’ ‘additionality’ – its capacity to compensate for loss – rests on these social restrictions. Yet, despite this fundamental reliance on altering human livelihood practices, the social dimensions of such projects are often under-analysed within their representation, monitoring, and evaluation. 1.4 Why Do These Failures Persist? Structural Explanations A) Dominance of technical and ecological framings in NbS design A central explanation lies in the dominance of technical and ecological expertise in NbS design and delivery. Projects are typically led by conservation biologists, ecologists, and technical consultants, with limited integration of social science, behavioural expertise, or political-economic analysis (Raymond et al., 2017; Turnhout et al., 2020. This reinforces a form of green positivism: the assumption that nature-based interventions are inherently beneficial and that ecological restoration or protection will, by extension, generate positive social outcomes (Olivadese, 2025). Such framings can obscure trade-offs, power relations, and the socio-political conditions through which outcomes are produced (Castree, 2020). This technical orientation is reinforced by what current practitioners understand as a structural misalignment between the societal challenges NbS are designed to address on paper and those experienced within project landscapes. This means that although NbS projects are typically framed around global objectives such as climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision, local contexts are often shaped by more immediate challenges, including poverty, food insecurity, weak governance, and heightened vulnerability. Projects rarely treat these local conditions as a core design concern, even though they strongly shape land-use decisions and livelihood strategies. As a result, NbS interventions are often implicitly expected to compensate for wider development and governance failures, despite lacking the mandate, resources, or institutional reach to do so. When these tensions are not explicitly acknowledged, they become embedded as untested assumptions within project Theories of Change – particularly assumptions about behaviour change, compliance, and uptake of alternatives (Raymond et al., 2017). B) Weak Social Analysis and Narrow Project Lenses These framings shape how social impacts are analysed and evidenced within NbS projects. While interventions typically generate detailed ecological data, social impacts are often treated as secondary considerations (Raymond et al., 2017; Turnhout et al., 2020). Social analysis is commonly conducted at an aggregated level, masking differentiated vulnerabilities and impacts at the household scale. Evidence from forest and land-use interventions shows that changes in access, resource use, or enforcement affect
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