Integrating Nature-Based Solutions Into River Basin Planning: Standards, Participation, Appraisal And Implementation Pathways

Nature-based Solutions, or NbS, are increasingly recognised as crucial instruments for addressing, in an integrated manner, water insecurity, climate risk, biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation; yet their implementation remains fragmented, is frequently confined to pilot projects and is only episodically incorporated into ordinary river basin planning, public appraisal processes and investment programming. This article proposes an integrated technical framework grounded in the joint reading of international standards, European documents on water regulation and planning, guidelines on co-creation and co-governance, reports on appraisal and handbooks on implementation and financing, in order to show that the full operability of NbS depends on the interaction between a rigorous conceptual definition, a planning scale consistent with hydrological functioning, inclusive forms of social construction of measures, evaluative methods capable of representing their overall public value and institutional arrangements able to translate strategies and programmes into implementable and investable projects. Within this perspective, the river basin is assumed as the privileged territorial unit for the organisation of action, while negotiated instruments such as the River Contract are interpreted as operational devices situated within a broader architecture of river basin governance, useful for territorialising strategic objectives, coordinating actors, building shared priorities and rendering implementable portfolios of interventions distributed across space.