A global systematic review of stakeholder participation in sustainable urban wetlands management

Despite their significant role in supporting human well-being, wetlands are among the most vulnerable ecosystems in the world, three times more endangered than the forests due to anthropogenic activities such urbanization, agriculture, construction, mining and aquaculture. Although disaggregated data remain limited, existing evidence suggests that the rate of wetland degradation is comparatively higher in urban areas than in rural settings. Rapid and unplanned urbanization is widely identified as a major driver of wetlands loss and degradation. However, there is dearth of information on structural mechanisms of stakeholder participation including power dynamics, institutional integration and local people engagement in urban context. This paper provides a systematic analysis to understand the dynamics of stakeholder participation in urban wetlands management. The PRISMA method was applied to ensure structured synthesis of literature obtained from the Scopus database and a total of 36 papers were analysed. The study also revealed stakeholder participation as an emerging trend in sustainable urban wetlands despite the variations in the participation extent for the different categories of stakeholders. Although the study was able to confirm the salient role of human involvement in urban wetlands management, it also revealed that effective urban wetlands governance is constrained by structural mechanisms such as top-down approaches, power dynamics, institutional fragmentation and conflicting stakeholder interests. To achieve genuine socio-ecological resilience, there is need to move beyond generic recommendations towards context-specific studies that evaluate who participates, how and with what outcomes. This will not only inform local policies but also the broader theoretical development on participatory governance in sustainable urban wetlands managements.