Engage your stakeholders: This is how you drive success in Nature-based Solutions

Picture yourself by a river that has overflowed its banks several times, causing damage to homes, fields, and roads, and leaving the community concerned about future floods. Now imagine a solution that doesn’t just build a bigger wall or a higher dam but actually works in harmony with nature: restoring wetlands, planting native trees and creating something beautiful and resilient. That’s the promise of Nature-based Solutions (NbS).

NbS are emerging as a powerful tool to address environmental challenges and simultaneously create co-benefits. But here’s the catch: making NbS projects work isn’t just about planting trees or restoring wetlands, it’s about getting the right people on board. At GIB we are working on accelerating the implementation of NbS as a sustainable, resilient, and regenerative alternative to traditional grey infrastructure.

Through our experience, we have identified a clear process for ensuring stakeholder engagement and distilled key principles and take-aways from the importance of stakeholder engagement in NbS projects. Drawing on practical lessons and experiences from Thessaly (Greece), in this blog we provide you with tools on how to engage stakeholders to make your NbS project a success.

Early stakeholder engagement makes or breaks NbS projects

NbS aren’t your typical infrastructure projects. They’re new, sometimes misunderstood, and can seem risky compared to the reliable old concrete-and-steel approach. Successfully implementing NbS therefore requires careful planning, especially during the prefeasibility phase.

If you try to roll out an NbS project without involving local stakeholders, you are likely to hit a wall of scepticism, misunderstanding, or even resistance. To bridge the knowledge gap and mitigate biases against non-conventional solutions, you need to involve people early and meaningfully.

The prefeasibility phase is the phase in which stakeholders can align around a common vision, contribute essential local knowledge, and ensure that the project meets the specific needs of the community. And suddenly, you’ve got local champions, valuable insights, and a real shot at lasting change.

Our experience in Thessaly, Greece

Let’s travel for a minute to the Pineios River basin in western Thessaly, Greece. It’s a region frequently impacted by extreme flooding. In 2021-2022, our team at GIB took on the challenge of exploring whether NbS could deliver critical ecosystem services, such as flood risk reduction and improved water availability. However, we knew that, to make a real difference, we needed to work with the local communities.

The whole engagement was underpinned by a collaborative approach, and GIB partnered with WWF Greece on the ground to ensure strong local commitment. Up until now, NbS hadn’t been tried in the area and people were curious, and maybe a little cautious, to see if this fresh approach could work. The project team conducted a series of interviews with local municipalities, regional authorities and other experts, complemented by bilateral discussions and in-person workshops.

We listened to what people were hoping for, what they were worried about, and what risks they saw in deploying NbS. This led to an increased buy-in and understanding of NbS in the region. In addition, we identified suitable NbS types and specific locations for implementation, and highlighted gaps in regional planning policies.

Read more about how we created long-term change here.

Effectively engage your stakeholders in 3 steps

This experience showed us how important it is to establish a transparent and structured process in the early stages of NbS implementation, where key decisions need to be taken. Inspired by the lessons we learned in Thessaly, we’ve distilled the engagement journey into three powerful steps that you too can apply to make your NbS project a success.

Step 1: Identify key actors

Before anything else, you need to identify the key stakeholders who will play a role throughout the project lifecycle. This includes local stakeholders, financial partners, insurers, and other entities that will influence the project's design and execution. Mapping out these actors and understanding their stakes and influence ensures that the right people are brought into the process at the right time. Creating a comprehensive stakeholder map and assigning roles and responsibilities early will build trust and deliver clarity on the expected engagement in the prefeasibility stage and all the way to full-scale implementation. By taking the lead on stakeholder engagement, GIB served as a neutral, purpose-focused broker, helping to align stakeholders around a shared goal.

By working with local partners who had deep connections to the community, such as farmers and academics (e.g. National Technical University of Athens), the project team was able to build trust and gather relevant data to then make sure the solution was contextually appropriate. WWF Greece acted as a local champion who was key to building trust, sourcing local knowledge, and ensuring credibility, connecting GIB with community leaders, NGOs, and citizens.

GIB also identified financial backers, which is essential to launch NbS projects. In Thessaly, the MAVA Foundation provided the seed funding, and the EIB provided not only financial support as an anchor investor, but also guidance and expertise to drive the project forward. Lastly, Swiss Re was engaged as a technical partner, offering light-touch data analyses and strategic guidance. Early engagement with insurers can help identify gaps, develop tailored insurance products, and provide data and insights to guide NbS development.

Step 2: Build a shared vision

Once key actors are identified, it’s crucial to align them around a common vision. So, once you’ve got your people in the room, don’t jump straight to action. Instead, start by listening: not all stakeholders will have the same understanding of NbS and the role it can play in providing infrastructure-like services.

In Thessaly, workshops and informal discussions helped build a shared vision of NbS as complements or alternatives to traditional infrastructure, offering added benefits such as ecosystem services and flood risk reduction. This alignment secured stakeholder commitment to the initiative’s long-term success.

Step 3: Sustain collaboration beyond the prefeasibility stage

Keeping excitement alive at the start of a project is one thing, but the next step is to keep people engaged as the project moves from ideas to action. Moving from the prefeasibility stage to implementation requires a strong commitment from local stakeholders and project partners.

Tip 1: Creating strong local buy-in and identifying clear financing pathways can help keep the momentum and make your NbS project a success from beginning to end. This can be achieved through a continued close engagement; by listening to concerns, providing evidence, and offering hands-on support, GIB turned dialogue into trust and tangible impact.

Tip 2: Setting clear goals, like a pilot project, keeps motivation high and provides a tangible target. It also establishes the conditions and guardrails needed to secure financing and ensure successful implementation. Tangible results also encouraged the integration of NbS into the region’s broader infrastructure planning, ensuring long-term impact.

Let’s get started!

NbS offer a powerful way to build a better, more resilient world, and stakeholder engagement is at the very heart of every successful NbS project. By following these stakeholder engagement principles and learning from examples like Thessaly, you can promote the wider use of NbS, creating more sustainable and resilient infrastructure for the future.

Learn more about how GIB catalyses the adoption of Nature-based Solutions.