Speaker
Description
Introduction
Nature-based solutions (NBS) address climate mitigation and adaptation while delivering environmental, social and economic benefits (Seddon et al., 2020; European Commission, 2016). Because they cut across sectors and directly affect communities, citizen participation is considered necessary to facilitate the process. Participation in NBS planning brings local knowledge into the process (Dhar and Khirfan, 2016), supports the acceptance and adoption of interventions (Kumar et al., 2020), increases social resilience (Koefoed, 2019) and promotes a sense of ownership over the outcome (Ferreira et al., 2020). Therefore, NBS demand a collaborative approach to their planning and implementation (Frantzeskaki, 2019).
One effective method for supporting collaborative planning is geodesign. It is a collaborative planning approach that combines spatial analysis, design and stakeholder engagement through an iterative, facilitated process supported by digital tools (Steinitz, 2012), in which participants sketch interventions directly onto maps, receive feedback on performance indicators, and negotiate alternative designs into a shared proposal (Ballal, 2015). Developed within the design disciplines as a corrective top-down decision-making, geodesign has been applied increasingly to environmental planning, and with the growth of NBS it is beginning to find application in this sector as well (Adem Esmail et al., 2025; McNally and Cocco, 2024).
However, geodesign pays little attention to who participates and how. A review of 59 geodesign case studies found that more than half involved no stakeholder participation, with processes dominated by professionals and institutional actors (Debnath, Pettit and Leao, 2022). Where geodesign workshops do gather communities, the deliberation occurring within them remains largely unexamined, because geodesign evaluates itself through the coherence of its spatial output rather than through the quality of the exchange that produced it.
On the other hand, deliberative democracy supplies the missing category. It conceptualises participation as reasoned dialogue among those affected by a decision (Habermas, 1994; Goodin, 2008). It is operationalised through deliberative mini-publics: facilitated forums where representative participants receive balanced information, deliberate in small groups, and formulate a collective position (Elstub and Escobar, 2019; Smith, 2009). It is explicit about the conditions this requires, including how participants are selected, how they are briefed, and how far experts shape the outcome (Suiter and Reuchamps, 2016; Cerovac, 2016).
This research therefore asks how integrating geodesign and deliberative democracy affects public participation in NBS planning.
Methodology
The research is grounded in three NBS co-creation workshops, held in local municipalities of Fingal (Ireland), Aveiro (Portugal) and Scandicci (Italy). Each brought together community to co-create spatial proposals addressing local challenges. Aveiro addressed a localised problem, the catchment of the Ribeira de Vilar, while Fingal and Scandicci worked at town and municipal scale.
All three followed a common geodesign sequence (Cocco et al., 2019), where participants worked in facilitated small groups, supported by Geodesignhub (Ballal, 2015), a digital platform which supported (1) identifying and co-creating spatially located ideas, where groups developed alternative spatial designs, and (2) negotiating them into shared proposals.
The case differed in the workshop structures (Table 1). Fingal and Aveiro included an expert-led learning phase, in which each group worked with a facilitator and a subject expert whose role was to clarify technical questions, supporting co-creation, while Scandicci ran without one. Group composition also differed: Aveiro formed a smaller, more demographically uniform group whose members mostly knew each other, whereas Fingal and Scandicci gathered participants with limited prior familiarity among themselves. However, all three groups were predominantly aged 40-65 and had diverse occupational backgrounds.
Two main instruments provide complementary evidence about what took place. Spatial data exported from Geodesignhub were analysed in ArcGIS Pro, tracing the number of proposals across the process and coding each proposal as explicit NBS, implicit NBS or non-NBS. Post-session questionnaires recorded participants' ratings of their comfort in expressing ideas, the treatment of differing opinions and the expert contribution.
Together, these allow the study to examine both the conditions under which deliberation occurred and the spatial proposals it produced, including knowledge transfer, participant equality, and the output of negotiated agreement.
Findings
The research evaluates deliberative aspects within the workshop session. It therefore seeks to understand whether and how deliberative approaches apply to a geodesign workshop on NBS planning. Thus, the research presents three aspects that can support providing evidence: (1) participants' comfort in the facilitated sessions, (2) the role of the experts in the sessions and how it affected (3) groups’ agreements and (4) the quality and quantity of the outputs.
Reported comfort varied across the three cases with regard to group composition (Table 2). Participants in Aveiro, a demographically homogeneous group of nine who were already acquainted, rated their comfort in expressing ideas at 4.75. Fingal, with twelve unacquainted participants, averaged 4.5, and Scandicci, with fifteen, averaged 3.9 (5-point scale). Ratings that followed the question of whether differing opinions among participants were shared and respected followed the same order (4.7, 4.6 and 4.1). Reports of dominance followed it as well: five participants in Scandicci and three in Fingal indicated that discussion had been dominated by particular individuals, while none did so in Aveiro.
Regarding the expert influence (Table 3), participants rated the usefulness of the expert contribution at 4.5 in Aveiro and 3.3 in Fingal on a 5-point scale. In Aveiro, the experts were planners from the municipal administration and the University of Minho; in Fingal, they were university researchers from the University College Dublin (UCD) based outside the area. Scandicci ran without an expert-learning phase. Consequently, agreement among the participants' ratings (when comparing the designs of the parallel sessions) (Table 3) did not follow the presence of an expert-learning phase. Scandicci, the only case run without one, produced the highest rate (33 agreements against 26 disagreements, 56%), while the two briefed cases produced 47% in Fingal (25 of 53) and 38% in Aveiro (14 of 37).
Finally, coding the final design proposals for each case showed that participants consistently worked beyond a sectoral understanding of NBS (Table 4). Proposals with no nature-based component formed the majority in Fingal (19 of 25, 76%) and Scandicci (21 of 33, 64%), covering mobility, infrastructure and land-use interventions alongside the nature-based ones. Aveiro was the exception, with NBS-relevant proposals forming a majority (8 of 14, 57%, of which 5 were explicit).
Discussion
Such findings provide a basis for examining the conditions under which geodesign can support meaningful deliberation and the co-creation of NBS.
The results suggest that the deliberative conditions within the workshops were influenced by the composition and familiarity of the participant groups. Aveiro recorded the highest levels of comfort and perceived respect for differing opinions, alongside no reported dominance. This may partly be because participants were largely acquainted with one another and shared relatively similar demographic characteristics, potentially creating a more comfortable environment for exchanging views. By contrast, Fingal and Scandicci brought together participants with limited prior familiarity and recorded slightly lower comfort and respect ratings, along with more reports of dominance. These differences suggest that participant familiarity may provide favourable conditions for deliberation.
The findings also indicate that experts' contribution depends not only on technical knowledge but also on familiarity with the local context. In Aveiro, where experts were drawn from the municipal administration and were therefore locally embedded, participants rated their contribution highly (4.5/5). This contrasts with Fingal, where university researchers from outside the area received a lower usefulness rating (3.3/5). Local experts may therefore be better positioned to connect technical knowledge with place-specific conditions and translate this knowledge into concrete spatial proposals.
However, the relationship between expert involvement and agreement reached during negotiation shows an inverse pattern. The two cases with an expert-learning phase recorded lower agreement rates (47% in Fingal and 38% in Aveiro) than Scandicci (56%), where no such phase took place. Rather than directly facilitating consensus, expert input may have helped participants develop a more critical understanding of technical constraints and, consequently, identify stronger grounds for accepting or rejecting particular proposals. Lower agreement should therefore not necessarily be interpreted as unsuccessful negotiation, but it may instead indicate more informed positions emerging through the deliberative process. In this sense, experts' contribution may be less about producing consensus and more about strengthening the knowledge through which participants negotiate.
Finally, the orientation of the outputs suggests that the scale and framing of the planning problem may influence how far participants develop NBS-specific solutions. Aveiro, which addressed the more clearly bounded problem of the Ribeira de Vilar catchment, produced the highest proportion of NBS-relevant proposals (62%), compared with 24% in Fingal and 36% in Scandicci, both of which addressed challenges at a broader municipal or town scale. This may suggest that participants identify NBS-oriented solutions more readily when working with a clearly defined, localised problem. At broader spatial scales, participants appear to move beyond NBS as a distinct intervention category and address interconnected issues such as mobility, infrastructure and land use.
Conclusion
Overall, this research critically reflects on how deliberative democracy can inform local collaborative NBS planning.
To conclude, participatory NBS planning can extend beyond a narrowly sectoral focus, enabling participants to situate NBS within broader spatial challenges related to mobility, infrastructure and land use. This suggests that NBS may not always be perceived as a primary community concern in their own right and may therefore be more effectively addressed when integrated with other locally relevant spatial priorities rather than presented as standalone solutions.
Furthermore, while deliberative mini-publics seek diverse and randomly selected representation (Suiter and Reuchamps, 2016), this approach can be challenging in local contexts, where the pool of willing participants may be limited, and it requires considerable resources. The findings also suggest that greater familiarity among participants can support more comfortable deliberation, while less familiar groups may experience greater conflict. A similar tension emerges around experts: their involvement can strengthen participants’ capacity to understand technical issues, but may also enable participants to articulate and defend their interests more strongly, making consensus harder to achieve.
Therefore, where consensus is sought, greater attention is needed to the mechanisms through which expert knowledge enters deliberation. However, deliberation should not be assessed solely through the consensus it produces, as it leads to some less tangible outputs such as strengthening participants’ knowledge, confidence and capacity to engage with complex planning issues (Innes and Booher, 1999; Healey, 1997), representing an important outcome of collaborative NBS planning, and further challenge to evaluate such outputs.
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