Engaging with the Natural Environment

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the debate on how nature can be understood as a stakeholder and to develop the idea of nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. While acknowledging the arguments against the stakeholder status of nature, we build on a growing stream of literature that argues that nature should and can have stakeholder status. To move beyond the arguments for and against the stakeholder status of nature, we suggest the idea of nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement that builds on the ideas of strong sustainability and ecocentrism. We suggest, first, that urban nature as an ideal context for the empirical examination of the nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. Second, we claim that multidisciplinary research is needed to understand the nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. Third, we highlight that specification of the particularities of nature is needed when speaking about the nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement.