Planting Trees, Sowing Dissent: Understanding resistance to nature-based solutions in urban Africa

While often championed as win–win solutions for nature and society, nature-based solutions (NBS) can face unexpected local pushback. This study investigates the paradox of why interventions designed to benefit urban communities provoke resistance, taking tree planting as an example. It asks how resistance to urban forestry-as-NBS manifests at the community level, why it emerges, and what outcomes it produces. A donor-funded project in Zomba, Malawi, aimed at reducing flood risks, serves as an embedded case study. The study uncovers a broad spectrum of resistance — ranging from vandalism, protests, noncompliance, tactical obstruction to formal legal appeals — motivated by land-use conflicts, divergent expectations of what problems trees should solve, and perceptions of injustice. Overarching comparative insights suggest that resistance across the different wards of the city shares deeper root causes in terms of simplistic solutions overlooking everyday realities of the socio-political, economic and cultural context. In this respect, the findings mirror critiques of other urban adaptation interventions, such as grey infrastructure and resettlement projects. At the same time, the case highlights distinctive dynamics of resistance to urban forestry-as-NBS. The multifunctionality of trees enabled residents to repurpose them in ways that reflected place-specific contexts and perceptions, for example shifting their role from flood risk mitigation to air purification around a sewage treatment plant. This highlights how multifunctionality can generate contestation over purpose, while also creating opportunities for locally meaningful adaptation. By showing how resistance to urban forestry-as-NBS both reflects broader patterns of contestation in climate adaptation literature and produces distinctive outcomes linked to multifunctionality, the study advances critical perspectives on NBS and contributes to debates on the politics and practice of climate interventions.