2025

Sarkki, Simo; Pihlajamäki, Mia; Soini, Katriina; Ojala, Ann; Kluvankova, Tatiana; Spacek, Martin; Mishra, Himansu; Hiedanpää, Juha

Collaborative approaches are increasingly analyzed in literature on environmental planning, governance, and management. However, three recent systematic literature reviews found that several co-concepts such as cocreation, co-design and co-production are often used interchangeably. We aim to add conceptual clarity on the co-concepts by using Nature-based solutions (NBS) as a case study. We conduct an integrative qualitative literature review on the concepts of co-creation, co-design, co-production and co-governance as used in connection to NBS. We screened 93 papers to identify key principles associated with the co-concepts linking especially to who are included in collaboration (stakeholders from policy, business, society and science), and why these collaborative approaches are needed (e.g. to develop contextual NBS approaches). We identified also key differences relating especially on the targeted output of the collaboration, and on how the collaboration is envisaged to happen across the co-concepts. Based on the results, we propose definitions for these concepts where co-creation refers to overall NBS “cycle”, co-design links to tools, co-production targets knowledge, and co-governance wider socio-environmental system. Furthermore, we also discuss emerging theme to consider multispecies actors as active collaborators in shaping NBS grounded in coevolutionary view. Our review helps to bring conceptual clarity on the use of co-concepts in NBS literature, and also to enhance their collaborative development, implementation, evaluation and finally impact. This is especially important in the era when coconcepts are widely used, but without clear definitions on their meaning.