Insurgent Nature-Based Solutions: Perspectives on Grassroots Environmental Adaptation

Dear Colleagues,

Nature-based solutions are central to debates on climate adaptation, resilience, liveability, and sustainable urban development. The prevailing discourse privileges formalised, technocratic, and state-led interventions based on expert-led and resource intensive development and management practices often predicated on experience from the global North. Thus, overlooking the informal, incremental and community-driven practices of environmental adaptation frequently practiced from the bottom up and in the global South.

This issue seeks contributions examining insurgent, adaptive and resource-responsive forms of environmental practice emerging through everyday urban life, including impromptu applications of blue-green infrastructure and low-tech environmental innovation. Contributions engaging the impacts of informal livelihoods, indigenous knowledge systems, community-led environmental governance and capabilities-based approaches are encouraged.

1. Scope

The special issue invites contributions examining the development, implementation, governance, and implications of more informal nature-based solutions from the Global North and South. Submissions engaged at national, regional, metropolitan, neighbourhood, community and household scales are sought demonstrating how grassroots practices may cross-pollinate policy, planning, theory and governance approaches. Such cases should not seek universally transferable “best practice,” but to prioritise grounded examples of “good practice” to inform creative and locally responsive development strategies. Submissions may adopt theoretical, empirical, methodological, or policy-oriented approaches. Qualitative ethnographic, participatory, and case study research is encouraged alongside quantitative investigations employing statistical investigation, remote sensing and spatial analysis.

2. Purpose and relation to existing literature

This special issue seeks to advance scholarship on subaltern approaches to nature-based adaptation to inform co-productive policy-making, practice, theorising and governance. By representing cases from the global North and South, the issue hopes to contribute to the decolonisation of nature-based solutions towards more environmentally and socially just outcomes that reflect lived experience.

Dr. Louis Lategan
Dr. Masilonyane Mokhele
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Urban Science is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• indigenous and local ecological knowledge
• blue-green infrastructure
• co-production
• collaborative governance
• low-tech innovation
• Southern theory
• informal greening