This paper investigates how the agency of local residents can affect persistent and unsustainable practices in urban water supply governance. Using a case study from Bangalore, India, we analyze a social-ecological trap which developed after a shift to external water provision paired with rapid urbanization. The reluctance of forsaking initial investments in infrastructure and competence, and the subsequent loss of the local network of lakes built for harvesting rainwater, reinforced dependence on external sources while undermining groundwater levels in the city. These feedbacks made water scarcity a structurally persistent feature of Bangalore. This situation started to change when local residents recently started organizing to preserve and restore Bangalore's lakes. By entering collaborative management agreements with municipal authorities, these lake groups have restored and established effective protection of five lakes. Through a case study of this civic engagement we show that the lake restorations have the potential to counteract trap mechanisms by restoring ecological functions, and by reducing water scarcity as groundwater levels rise and authorities are relieved from maintenance and monitoring tasks. Importantly, these lake groups have also created opportunities for over a dozen similar groups to form across the city. This demonstrates that social movements can be an important source of change in social-ecological traps.

Urban environmental governance is often hampered by social institutions being poorly aligned with fragmented ecosystems. Bottom-up approaches have been argued to address this problem of social-ecological fit, but there is a lack of empirical understanding of how local initiatives might emerge and spread in a way that enhances fit. We study a system of hydrologically interconnected lakes in Bengaluru, which public authorities have largely failed to protect resulting in many degraded lakes and undermined societal and ecological benefits that the system of lakes provides. Local residents have, largely in response to these failures, formed lake groups and convinced municipal actors to recognize them as partners that share management responsibilities for certain lakes. These initiatives have inspired others to follow suit and work with lakes elsewhere in the city, hence triggering the question whether local lake groups in this way contribute to a better social–ecological fit at a broader landscape scale. This study mixes quantitative social–ecological network analysis with interviews to analyze fit and describe the processes by which lake management can be shaped to match ecosystem structure. Results show that certain key lake groups – enabled by supportive municipal officers – have successfully innovated how lakes are managed, acknowledging their place in and dependence on the broader network of interconnected lakes. In the wake of this, a new generation of collaborative lake groups is emerging, where lakes are often managed more holistically by recognizing them to be part of the larger network of lakes. The analysis identifies key lake groups that are instrumental to shaping the spread of the bottom-up driven initiatives in ways that aligns with the interconnected nature of the lake system. This is a process that relies on acknowledgement and support from public authorities, but is primarily driven by local actors. By describing this process of innovation and diffusion, the study contributes important lessons on how to enhance fit between governance arrangements and the ecosystem on which cities depend.

Participation of local residents is considered beneficial for urban environmental stewardship, but the understanding of how urban stewards relate to the places they work with is poorly developed. This study of civic groups working to steward urban waterfronts challenges the notion that stronger attachment drives deeper commitment to stewardship. The study looks at three types of groups doing stewardship work on waterfronts and water bodies in New York City: community groups, environmental groups and recreational groups. Using interviews and Likert scale surveys (n=31), we assessed stewardship activities, place attachment and place meanings that members associate with site that each group works with. Our findings show that community group members are more attached to the sites they work with than members of environmental or recreational groups, but environmental groups report the greatest effort put into stewardship work. Further, we show that place meanings reveal different categories of groups based on how they currently view the site (as a place of work, a place of home, or a place of use), and what they want to achieve for it in their stewardship work: some groups work to restore what the place was previously, others work to protect what it currently is, while a few work to create a new identity for their place. These findings demonstrate how pathways to stewardship differ and are not dependent on strong place attachment; however, they can generate fundamentally different outcomes depending on what place meanings stewardship seeks to protect.

Current sustainability challenges - including biodiversity loss, pollution and land-use change require new ways of understanding, acting in and caring for the landscapes we live in. The concept of stewardship is increasingly used in research, policy and practice to articulate and describe responses to these challenges. However, there are multiple meanings and framings of stewardship across this wide user base that reflect different disciplinary purposes, assumptions and expertise, as well as a long history of use in both academic and lay contexts. Stewardship may therefore be considered a 'boundary object'; that is, a conceptual tool that enables collaboration and dialogue between different actors whilst allowing for differences in use and perception. This paper seeks to map out the multiple meanings of stewardship in the literature and help researchers and practitioners to navigate the challenges and opportunities that come with using the term. We provide the first qualitative systematic review of stewardship, and identify four distinct meanings of the concept in the literature: Ethic, Motivation, Action and Outcome. We then develop a novel framework for thinking through and connecting these multiple meanings, centered around three dimensions: care, knowledge and agency. This framework is used to identify the care dimension and relational approaches as important areas for future stewardship research. In these efforts - and for scholars engaging with the stewardship concept more broadly - this paper can act as a helpful 'centering device', connecting practitioners, policy-makers and researchers from multiple disciplines in pursuit of sustainability.