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 households unevenly depending on income sources, tenure security, gender roles, labour availability, and exposure to risk – dimensions that are rarely examined systematically (Cousins, 2024). These gaps are most pronounced at early project stages, when core design choices and Theories of Change (ToC) are established. Early assessments do not generally include systematic assessment of minimum social enabling conditions such as poverty severity, governance fragility, livelihood dependence, or behavioural drivers to test project feasibility from a social perspective. More detailed socioeconomic analysis is typically introduced later in the project cycle, most often through Social and Biodiversity Impact Assessments (SBIAs), once projects are already structurally defined or scaled. At this stage, social data tends to inform mitigation, compensation, or benefit-sharing measures rather than the underlying logic of intervention. As a result, key assumptions about participation, behaviour change, incentives, and local ownership are embedded into project ToCs before sufficient evidence exists to validate them, limiting the scope for meaningful adaptation downstream. Taken together, these patterns point not to a missing social ‘checkbox’, but to the absence of context-sensitive ToC that treat social assumptions as hypotheses requiring evidence, testing, and revision. 74
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