Contextualising ‘connection to nature’ as a collective aspiration in urban settings: a case study in Canberra, Australia

The pervasive challenge of biodiversity loss is increasingly framed as necessitating transformative change, including revised relationships between people and the rest of the natural world. The ambition to better connect people with nature is widely shared across environmental science, policy and management. However, to date, the dominant focus has been on individual-level connections fostered through specific interventions, rather than collective efforts to foster connection to nature through coordination, planning, and governance at city and regional scales. In this paper, we present a qualitative, place-based approach that examines how connection to nature might be contextualised as a collective governance concern. Working with environmental practitioners from government, non-government organisations, and universities across the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), we engaged a co-production workshop methodology to explore locally meaningful understandings of connection to nature and strategies to enable them across urban, rural, and protected area landscapes in and around Canberra, Australia. The process surfaced how people-nature relations are shaped by institutional, material, and cultural conditions, and generated ideas for feasible near-term actions alongside longer-term directions for improving environmental governance and coordination. The approach provides an example of how collective, place-specific sense-making can make connection to nature intelligible and actionable within existing planning, reporting, and wellbeing frameworks.