Co-creation & coevolution
COEVOLVERS suggests a radical solution for NBS design and implementation. Instead of approaching NBS design as an engineering task, NBS are being re-conceptualised as co-creative processes that sustain and enrich co-evolutionary potential in and between the ecosystems and human settings. COEVOLVERS’s approach for co-creation has led to considering the creation of a new type of “natureculture”, structures that bring opportunities for both people and nature. This process is conceptualised as naturecultural niche construction. Niche construction is a biological process in which organisms modify their environment in lasting ways that make it more suitable for themselves. While niche construction alters an organism’s own environment, it transforms the environments of other organisms and the selection pressures acting within them, thereby influencing the development and evolution of both the organism’s own species and those of others. Naturecultural niche construction captures spontaneity, creativity, and potentiality in doing and undergoing change toward admired futures. COEVOLVERS addresses the formation of habits and intrinsic values in the long run, gradually changing the aesthetic, ethical, and scientific principles of urban land use planning.
Toward nature-based governance
Governance is typically understood as the coordination of multilayered social relations and processes in the absence of a unifying authority. Governance encompasses a diverse range of approaches that involve stakeholder collaboration, community engagement, and reflexivity to effectively implement environmental and societal solutions. However, understanding and addressing multispecies vulnerabilities in NBS has remained in a blind spot. COEVOLVERS has targeted its work and gained results on the vulnerability-producing circumstances that require specific governance measures to protect the sovereignty, autonomy, and individuality of people, but also non-human agencies in naturecultural niche construction. COEVOLVERS call this approach Nature-Based Governance (NBG). The NBG is a governance mode in which multispecies’ lived environments, affordances, and the admired goals or telos are systematically articulated and brought into the institutional reconfiguration processes responding to the circumstantial life-challenges and multispecies’ justice requirements.
Transdisciplinary collaboration, learning and ethics
COEVOLVERS’ work has been transdisciplinary in all three senses: across disciplines, with practitioners in real-life settings, and in expanding knowledge beyond normal disciplinary boundaries through digital, arts-based, and other co-creative methodologies. Doing research in multispecies settings, especially when focusing on vulnerable and marginalized people and nonhuman animals, raises ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas. In COEVOLVERS, situational ethical reflection on what is the right thing to do in research or Living Lab settings is continuously practiced to identify, address, and resolve ethical questions.