Understanding engagement in nature-based solutions through a sensemaking perspective. A case study from the Northern French Alps

: Despite growing policy support and high expectations regarding their potential to address climate and biodiversity crises, engagement in Nature-based Solutions (NbS) remains limited. We adopt a sensemaking perspective to examine how actors decide whether to engage in NbS, understood here as a form of strategic change. We draw on a qualitative case study of green engineering experiments aimed at restoring eroded engineered slopes in a highly transformed mountain territory in the Northern French Alps. Based on interviews with a diverse set of actors and observations of two participatory experiments conducted in contrasting organisational contexts, we analyse how actors make sense of the object (engineered slopes), the problem (erosion), the solution (green engineering), and the broader shift from grey to green engineering, across individual, organisational, and territorial levels. We show that engagement depends on configurations of senses—that is, combinations of meanings attributed to the different facets of an NbS across levels—whose degree of alignment positively influences engagement. We also demonstrate that participatory experiments act as productive sensemaking episodes by providing ecological and social cues that reshape these configurations over time. This study contributes to research on NbS by conceptualising engagement as an emergent outcome of sensemaking rather than the activation of predefined levers, and to the sensemaking literature by foregrounding the content and configuration of senses, alongside their dynamics. We conclude by outlining operational implications for designing participatory processes that may support engagement in NbS.1.