Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Nature-based Solutions are increasingly recognised as a critical strategy for climate change adaptation and mitigation, yet their effective implementation depends not only on technical and environmental factors but on the governance systems that support them. This study aims to identify governance enablers and barriers for the implementation of Nature-based Solutions by combining a systematic literature review with an empirical assessment of stakeholder inputs from an Italian case study situated in the Veneto region, where a demonstration project tests vegetation-based riverbank restoration and selective maintenance strategies. The research adopts a two-stage thematic analysis. First, the literature review was inductively coded through design-related and intent-related leverage points, generating sub-themes categorised accordingly: information flows, institutional structure, planning instruments, and policy and legal frameworks (design-related); and awareness, community values, political will and trust, and stakeholder engagement and equity (intent-related). This framework was then applied deductively to the empirical practitioners data. Results show that enablers and barriers rarely operate as opposites, more often describing the same governance condition from two directions, and reveal a marked asymmetry between sources: the literature concentrates on design-related conditions, while practitioners concentrate on intent-related conditions such as awareness, cultural disposition, and trust. The research also illustrates that project-based interventions can accelerate the emergence of new governance practices without by themselves achieving the institutional legitimation needed to embed them into durable planning structures. The study concludes that the central challenge for upscaling Nature-based Solutions lies in the institutional translation of practices demonstrated at project level into ordinary territorial governance and planning frameworks, addressing in particular cooperative knowledge flows between expertise and institutions, coherence between planning and policy frameworks, participation as a mechanism of perceptual and cultural change, and trust as a relational condition for legitimation, so that the experience can generate a lasting political framework beyond a single point intervention.</p>