Urban green spaces (UGS) provide various ecosystem services essential for citizens’ welfare, especially as cities grow more diverse and densely populated. Participatory and adaptive governance can enhance the sustainability of UGS management, but close examination of citizens’ willingness to participate is scarce. Using a discrete choice experiment, we explored citizens’ willingness to participate in UGS management in Umeå, a medium-sized city in Northern Sweden. Participatory schemes reflecting the ladders of citizen participation and natural resource governance principles were selected as the experimental attributes. Results from a two-group latent class logit revealed a strong divergence: 55% of our sample were willing to allocate their time, but the other 45% were not. Willingness to participate values were higher for participatory schemes that improve key governance principles with lower responsibilities. Our findings point to a need for flexible and multi-layered UGS governance that incorporates participatory options with varying degrees of time commitment and responsibility to enhance inclusiveness, legitimacy, and accountability without compromising efficiency or adaptability. • Study integrates governance theory with discrete choice experiments for UGS • Introduces time as a trade-off variable in participatory governance analysis • Reveals the limits of universal participation ideals in urban commons governance • Differentiated participation strategies can improve governance outcomes • Results support participation models to foster inclusion mechanisms
Obregon-Santander et al. (Fri,) studied this question.