While these standards are largely voluntary rather than legally binding, they play a significant role in shaping investor expectations and corporate risk assessments. At the level of norms and standards, therefore, there is little ambiguity: NbS are expected to be socially inclusive, rights-respecting, and participatory. Yet despite this convergence between evidence and standards, implementation outcomes 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 forest-based 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 73
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM0Mzk2