Crowdfunding the Civic Engaged Urban Nature-based Solutions

Abstract

In recent years, because of its multi-purpose benefits and climate adaption functions, nature-based solutions (NBS) have gradually been integrated with urban planning in order to tackle current environmental challenges. Inadequate financial resources are one of the significant barriers for implementing NBS, but these barriers are overcome by offering specific financing channels and increasing the private sector’s participation. One of the financing mechanisms is using crowdfunding (CF) to collect public donations. However, besides the financial benefit, it is still unclear what other functions CF can provide to allow sub-national governments (SNGs) to collaborate with the civil society within urban NBS governance process. SNGs should collaborate with citizens so the outcome of sustainable urban transitions could become more innovative, increase quantity and quality of urban green space and enhance social cohesion and environmental awareness.

This thesis endeavours to contribute to the understanding of how SNGs can use CF to finance and facilitate civic engagement in urban NBS. The research adopts a policy arrangement approach as the conceptual foundation to build upon the CF propositions. Through the academic understanding of CF’s contribution toward the emergence of smart cities and the successful factors for civic engagement in urban NBS governance, the research summaries 13 factors with four policy arrangement dimensions that SNGs should develop for civic engagement in urban NBS governance. The research has proposed five CF propositions and adopted multiple case studies to test the propositions’ validity. The study cases include: (1) The City of Ghent with Crowdfunding.gent, (2) The Province of Noord-Brabant with Crowdfunding VoorNatuur, and (3) The City of Manchester with Spacehive.

In conclusion, the research proposes that SNGs can adopt CF with five principles to complement their policy arrangement for facilitating civic engagement in urban NBS governance: (1) consider CF as an instrument to facilitate collective volunteering actions between SNGs and the civil society, and the policy discourse should connect CF campaign’s outcome to the NBS development, (2) define the CF campaign’s functions in order to ensures the effectiveness and performance of civic engagement in NBS projects, (3) adopt CF as an institutional innovation to conduct flexible governance for civic engagement in urban NBS, (4) use CF to diversify the NBS projects’ participants and strengthen the coalition between the authority and civil society and (5) adopt CF to provide finance, environmental expertise and informational and social capital toward civic engagement in urban NBS projects.