RELATE4NATURE is a Horizon Europe project exploring how socio-economic and governance systems can be transformed to better support biodiversity restoration, climate resilience, social justice and human well-being. Many of the instruments, visions and valuation methods that shape how societies use, manage and restore nature are strongly influenced by economic approaches focusing on a narrow set of monetised, instrumental values, i.e. what can nature provide to people in economic terms. These approaches often struggle to capture how biodiversity, human well-being, and justice are interlinked and may overlook the relational and intrinsic values of nature (e.g. care, identity, responsibility towards nature). 

Objectives

RELATE4NATURE addresses these challenges by examining how alternative socio-economic models can recognise a broader range of nature’s values and can be combined, tested and scaled in practice. The project looks beyond individual decisions to the wider systems that shape them, including policies, institutions, economic incentives, governance arrangements, social norms and relationships between people and nature. The overall aim is to support systemic and sustained transformations in socio-economic systems, ecological governance, and human-nature relations towards a biodiversity-positive, climate resilient, and socially just future. 

A central focus is on developing pathways for scaling promising alternative approaches. This means identifying what would need to change in policy, governance, institutions, financing, behaviour and practice for approaches tested in specific places to be adapted and taken up more widely across sectors, regions and levels of governance.

Planned activities

To achieve these objectives, RELATE4NATURE will:

• Review and compare different socio-economic models, examining both widely used approaches and alternatives that give greater attention to diverse values of nature, wellbeing and justice.
• Pilot a relational biodiversity economics approach in eight pilot cases across four impact areas: agriculture and rewilding, green energy and biodiversity, nature-positive urban and regional planning, and ecological guardianship.
• Identify individual and collective barriers and enablers to scaling alternative socio-economic models, including behavioural, institutional, governance, legal and economic aspects.
• Co-design pathways for scaling alternative approaches to move beyond individual experiments and support wider atoption.
• Develop practical tools and learning resources to support policymakers, businesses, planners, practitioners and communities to apply different pathways for scaling biodiversity-positive socio-economic models.

Ecologic Institute in RELATE4NATURE

The project is coordinated by Ecostack Innovations, bringing together 21 partners across 15 countries. Ecologic Institute contributes to the project’s work on governance, barriers to change and collaboration with the eight pilot cases. In particular, Ecologic Institute leads two tasks:

1. A literature review to identify key barriers, enablers and potential levers of change that can affect the scaling and uptake of alternative socio-economic models.
2. Coordinating the pilot activities across the project, acting as a central interface between the scientific requests and the on-the-ground implementation, as well as facilitating exchange and learning within and across the pilots.

Through these activities, Ecologic Institute helps connect the project’s research on systemic change with practical experience from the pilot cases and supports coordination around how alternative approaches can be tested, adapted and scaled in different contexts.