Soil and water bioengineering between knowledge and governance: practitioners' conceptual positioning, improvement priorities, and innovation pathways

Soil and Water Bioengineering (SWB) is an established discipline increasingly reframed within emerging policy concepts such as Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) and Green and Blue Infrastructure (GBI). However, it remains unclear how this conceptual repositioning translates into professional practice, and whether governance and institutional frameworks keep pace with practitioners’ needs. This study investigates the science-policy interface of SWB in Italy by examining how practitioners position the discipline conceptually, what barriers they encounter, and which improvement priorities and innovation pathways they identify. Data were collected through a questionnaire administered in 2024, yielding 1,428 responses classified into specialists (professionally involved in SWB, 26.54%), familiar (aware but not practicing, 50.49%), and unfamiliar respondents (no prior SWB knowledge, 22.97%). Results reveal a specialist core rooted in agriculture/forestry and geology, with familiar respondents recognizing SWB functions and expressing interest in training. While practitioners broadly situate SWB within the NBS framework – treating NBS and GBI as umbrella concepts - this conceptual alignment does not correspond to coherent intervention classification, exposing significant ambiguity at the science-practice interface. Practitioners identify improvement needs more clearly than innovation pathways: training, institutional awareness, regulatory clarity, monitoring, and vegetation management rank as priorities, whereas innovation is primarily conceived through a techno-scientific lens, encompassing materials, plant-based components, and digital tools. These findings suggest that SWB development is constrained less by technical gaps than by governance deficits, weak standardization, and insufficient long-term monitoring frameworks. The study offers actionable insights for policy actors seeking to embed nature-based practices more effectively within regulatory and institutional structures.