C) Communities as Risks or Beneficiaries of Social Investment Weak social analysis and technically driven framings translate into two dominant models of community inclusion within NbS practice. First, communities are frequently framed as risks to be managed, particularly where local land use or resource-dependent livelihoods are perceived as incompatible with conservation objectives. This logic underpins contemporary forms of fortress conservation, including exclusionary protected-area models, criminalisation of customary practices, and coercive enforcement. Extensive literature documents the social consequences of these approaches, including livelihood loss, displacement, and erosion of trust between communities and conservation authorities (Brockington, 2002; West, Igoe & Brockington, 2006; Duffy et al., 2019). Second, even where communities are formally included, they are often positioned primarily as beneficiaries of social investment rather than as active agents of environmental change. Project governance and ownership remain external to the landscape, with decision-making authority concentrated among international developers, donors, buyers, or technical partners. NbS practitioners raise how these power dynamics shape the way inclusion approaches are operationalised – typically through compensation, benefit-sharing, or alternative income-generating activities, rather than through co-design and long-term local ownership. Social safeguards, SBIAs, and grievance mechanisms come to be framed as tools for managing reputational or compliance risk, prioritising procedural compliance over transformative outcomes. As a result, livelihood is reduced to income substitution, participation is limited to benefit receipt, and communities are positioned as recipients rather than co-producers of environmental outcomes. This constrains both the social legitimacy and durability of conservation gains (Smyth & Vanclay, 2017). 1.5 Implications: Towards a Social Transformation Lens Taken together, this diagnosis shows that the limits of current NbS practice do not stem from gaps in ecological knowledge or the absence of standards, but from a persistent tendency to frame NbS as technical interventions detached from the social processes through which environmental outcomes are produced. Because NbS depend on changes in behaviour, land use, and governance, they function as social transformations as much as ecological ones (Scoones et al., 2020). The implementation gap is therefore rooted in untested or weakly examined assumptions embedded in project ToC – assumptions that shape design, feasibility, and monitoring yet are rarely treated as hypotheses requiring evidence and validation. As recent conservation research highlights (Opatovsky et al., 2025), these assumptions overwhelmingly concern human dimensions, including governance, participation, scalability, and capacity. 75
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