Using Geodesign as a boundary management process for planning nature-based solutions in river landscapes

Area of Science:

• Environmental Planning
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Background:

• Nature-based solutions (NBS) offer participatory approaches to address societal challenges.
• Geodesign shows potential for facilitating NBS planning, boundary management, and impact assessment, but empirical evidence is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and test a Geodesign process for planning with NBS.
• To evaluate Geodesign's contributions to boundary management in NBS planning.

Main Methods:

• A one-day Geodesign workshop involving eleven stakeholders.
• Stakeholders delineated priority areas, modified land uses, and assessed ecosystem service impacts.
• Evaluation of boundary management functions (translation, communication, mediation) and attributions (credibility, salience, legitimacy).

Main Results:

• Generated spatial NBS scenarios demonstrating land-use changes and ecosystem service impacts.
• Identified challenges in translating narrative scenarios into maps across diverse stakeholders.
• Found that communication was facilitated, but mediation using an indicator tool caused frustration.

Conclusions:

• Geodesign can effectively support the co-design of NBS.
• Successful NBS co-design requires integrating Geodesign into broader collaborative frameworks.
• Further refinement of mediation tools within Geodesign is necessary for optimal boundary management.