benefits for climate and people, the number of NbS-related initiatives and programmes increased approximately sixfold in the last decade, driven largely by development finance institutions and multilateral investment (IDOS, 2020). Yet this promise hinges on human and institutional processes: beyond ecological design, NbS outcomes are produced by how projects engage with governance arrangements, behavioural incentives, and the social contexts in which land-use decisions are made. At the level of definition, NbS explicitly foreground the interdependence of ecological and social systems. The IUCN (2025) defines NbS as actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore ecosystems in ways that address societal challenges while simultaneously delivering benefits for human wellbeing and biodiversity. Parallel formulations emphasise the role of human behaviour and governance in sustaining ecological outcomes (Seddon et al., 2020; The World Bank, 2019). In principle, NbS therefore reject the historical separation of people and nature in conservation. Yet despite this conceptual grounding, evidence suggests that NbS implementation often struggles to realise these ambitions in complex, real-world settings (Olivadese, 2025). Across many interventions, particularly in contexts marked by high resource dependence and governance constraints, communities experience uneven social and economic effects, including changes in access to land and resources, livelihood disruption, and limited influence over decision-making (Brockington, 2002; Wong et al., 2022; IEEP, 2020). This gap between theory and practice raises an important question for the mining sector and NbS funders alike: why do interventions framed as people-centred often fail to deliver these outcomes on the ground? This paper argues that a central driver of this gap lies in the reliance on implicit and insufficiently tested social assumptions embedded within project design. When social context is insufficiently analysed, assumptions become foundational elements of project Theories of Change (ToC) despite limited evidence –shaping feasibility decisions, monitoring frameworks, and investment judgments. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, sector experience and current practitioner insights, the paper advances three interrelated explanations: (A) dominance of technical and ecological framings in NbS design; (B) communities’ positioning as risks or beneficiaries, shaped by governance and power relations; (C) project lenses that overlook social and landscape dynamics, resulting in fragile ToCs and incomplete measures of success. 1.2 What the Literature Already Establishes: Communities as Central to Conservation Success Although NbS are presented as separate from traditional conservation projects, in practice they encompass a broad set of ecosystem preservation, forest conservation, and restoration interventions that rely on changes in land and resource-use patterns. As such, they often draw 71
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