Emerging New Governance of Urban Afforestation Projects: The Case of Micro-forests in the City of Paris

Like many European cities, Paris is engaged in planning for new nature-based solutions in order to mitigate the local effects of climate change, biodiversity loss and offer new amenities to urbanites. If the quantitative goals are clearly stated (e.g. 170,000 newly planted trees by 2026), the planning discourses fall short on the expected ecological benefits as well as the governance path to implement new urban forests.

Based on a qualitative inquiry from 2019 to 2022, I explain how a civic group has contributed to new planning proposals through experimenting with a new micro-forest planting practice (The “Miyawaki method”) on three pilot sites. I describe the collaborative and everyday governance processes that emerged from the participatory budget and grew through the implementation of multi-actors’ partnerships between civic leaders and technical managers of the Paris municipality. Through experimental practices, this experience highlights the combined role of social-ecological innovation and new institutional arrangements in designing more inclusive nature-based solutions in cities. Finally, the case-study shows the limitations of this experiment as it shows insufficient political support for planting site monitoring, which is based only on punctual call for projects, impacting both local social mobilization and ecological dynamics of the growing  micro-forests.

Hugo Rochard is an environmental geographer working at the interface between biodiversity and social-territorial dynamics. His doctoral research was focused on urban biodiversity, civic collective actions and management policies in the cities of Paris and New York. Using mixed methodologies in environmental and social sciences, he likes to cross biodiversity surveys with qualitative ethnographic inquiries, looking at the many interactions within social-ecological systems. He is now working as a post-doc on the IMPACT project (Biodiversa+), looking at the role of parasites in environmental governance and society.

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