This chapter sets the context for understanding how urban nature and nature-based solutions are governed by defining governance, highlighting different types and forms of governance, and discussing the roles that different actors play in various governance arrangements while putting the governance of urban nature into a multi-level perspective. The chapter provides a typology of governance approaches, through which the roles, constellations, and responsibilities of actors, financial sources, and institutional arrangements are outlined and discussed. It then highlights the challenges and opportunities for governing urban nature and proposes a set of eight principles and values underpinning effective governance as well as exploring the challenges and potential conflicts arising among these principles when many of them are applied at the same time. The chapter engages with two case studies to illustrate its key messages: Isar River Restoration in Munich, Germany, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens, Greece.

While conventional accounts of the political landscape highlight Australia’s well-established formal institutions such as the electoral system, parliament, federalism, the public service and judiciary, a holistic approach to the study of Australian politics must also include the political contributions of a wider range of citizens and the various ways in which governments attempt to structure their input.

The chapter begins with a description of the organisational landscape of citizens’ groups in Australian politics and summarises the main advantages and drawbacks arising from the active participation and engagement of citizens’ groups.

The relative merits and drawbacks ofgovernment-initiated opportunities for citizens to contribute to political debate and public policy are then discussed with reference to theoretical modelling of community engagement.

The final section of the chapter examines the new challenges arising from the growing citizen participation and demand for community engagement in Australian politics. The discussion of these issues demonstrates how the participation and engagement of citizens’ groups is evolving in 21st century Australia.

Chapter 3 is an analysis of the sociological and ecological literature surrounding the problem of human–wildlife conflict and so describes the non-legal context. It begins with an analysis of the problem itself and the terminology surrounding human–wildlife conflict. The chapter then suggests that specific management models are not equipped to deal with the value conflicts that surround instances of human–wildlife conflict. Approaches to wildlife management are heavily based on reductionist scientific formulations that exclude consideration of the needs of the community and the wildlife concerned with conflict. They often do not allow for an emotional connection with wildlife or encourage positive experiences. They also often do not consider the historical social conflicts surrounding the symptomatic wildlife behaviour. Such approaches are vulnerable to political pressure and work in conjunction with a top-down state response to exclude particular people and reduce human and ecological security. The primary finding of the chapter is that management of wildlife at the ground level most often seeks to promote individual autonomy and, as discussed in Chapter 2, such an emphasis is not conducive to an appropriate response to human–wildlife conflict.

Intuitively, much research in commons research focuses on collaborative governance of environmental resources. At the same time, due to the pressures of climate change, the number of natural disasters will only increase, and humanitarian crises are already on an uptake. As a result, I aim to extend this line of inquiry in my discussion of humanitarian aid as a shared and contested common resource. I take the example of the 2013–2016 West Africa Ebola Epidemic, which occurred along the border of three countries with different institutional histories.Drawing on interviews with 100 civil society organizations and domestic NGOs, I illustrate how top-down management of the 2013–2016 Ebola Response by governmental and international organizations led to policy failure, only until local organizations were involved. Ebola unveils the inefficiency of neglecting local actors, typical in international humanitarian response. In addition, contestation of humanitarian aid resources viewed as “commons” by recipients and “private” by international aid organizations fuels tensions in the aid relationship, and particularly during a crisis where local buy-in is essential.

The democratic values discussed in the two preceding chapters are represented in four basic governance structures in contemporary public administration.The democratic influencegovernance structures, such as the rules and hierarchies of bureaucracy, or the mechanisms for consensus in participatory structures are considered.A framework for understanding the trade-offs between accountability and process values is provided.

This chapter presents an approach to assess the adaptive capacity of collaborative governance institutions. The approach links institutions and attributes believed to support societies in responding to social-ecological change. The application of such an approach to empirical studies demonstrates how adaptive capacity can be assessed and compared in a systematic fashion. It also sheds light on how different political, economic, and social factors enable or constrain adaptive capacity. By investigating the complex and interrelated nature of institutions and interdependence of adaptive capacity attributes, the chapter offers insights into the kinds of governance qualities that are conducive to adaptive capacity. Further, it underscores the role of contextual factors and power relations in shaping adaptive capacity and points out the need to consider such roles in future adaptive capacity assessments.

This chapter provides the conceptual foundations for discussing the process and impact of co-creation as a mode of governance as developed in subsequent chapters. To do this, the chapter traces the genealogy of the notion of co-creation, discussing how it has become increasingly central to social science research, and defining the concept in ways that distinguish it from similar and related concepts such as corporatism and collaborative governance. Building on this genealogical approach, the chapter also discusses how recently developed theories may contribute to our understanding of the concept of co-creation and support its practical application. Finally, yet critically, the chapter will justify our attempt to elevate the concept from its original narrow focus on service production to a concept that aspires to become a new governance paradigm supplementing and partially supplanting Classical Public Administration and New Public Management.

− Allocation & Access in ESG–Agency studies is broadly seen as the process of sharing resources among multiple users, where efficiency and equity are the analytical tools for allocation and access, respectively.− Within ESG–Agency scholarship, the allocation of and access to water, food, land, and forest systems is studied widely, but is especially focused on developing countries in Asia, Africa, and South America.− Opportunities for future research include furthering understanding the trade-offs and synergies in conservation policies and potential conflicts with ownership and livelihoods, the role of gender in resource management (especially water resources), evaluating the types of power wielded in this area, and understanding how people acquire it.

Cooperation is an important way that decision centres interact in a polycentric governance system. Cooperation in governance has been studied by numerous scholars in the field of 'collaboration', although such scholarship seldom explicitly sets it within the framework of polycentricity. Cooperation involves multiple decision centres working across boundaries to pursue shared goals, and it is especially prevalent for addressing complex socio-ecological systems. This chapter examines cooperation in the Puget Sound basin, USA, for ecosystem restoration. This chapter describes how authority, information, and resources affected cooperation in formation of the Puget Sound Partnership and related Local Integrating Organizations, development of ecosystem recovery plans, and implementation of ecosystem recovery projects. It assesses polycentric governance performance in terms of outcomes and processes. The Puget Sound ecosystem restoration efforts exhibit relatively high levels of coherence, representation, and adaptability; relatively low levels of efficiency and accountability; and mixed results on efficacy and network building.