Participatory Greening: International Experiences

Urban greening plays a crucial role in urban planning due to its environmental, economic, and social benefits. It contributes to climate change mitigation, improves air quality, reduces urban heat island effects, and enhances biodiversity. Additionally, green spaces increase property values, attract investment, and create economic opportunities. On a social level, they improve public health, foster social cohesion, and enhance the overall quality of life. However, despite these benefits, many cities in the Global South face persistent challenges, including limited green coverage due to rapid urbanization, constrained financial resources, and weak policy enforcement. Urban greening interventions vary in scale and impact. Large-scale initiatives include afforestation and urban forests, while smaller solutions encompass tactical interventions such as pocket parks and building scale measures like green roofs and walls. Each intervention contributes differently to food security, sustainability, social cohesion, livability, and economic resilience. Local authorities play a significant role in fostering, implementing, and sustaining the different urban greening efforts from institutional, strategic, and operational levels. Local authorities play a key role in enabling urban greening by creating supportive institutional frameworks, strategic plans, and operational mechanisms. The benchmarking report “Participatory Greening: International Experiences” is part of the “Supporting Green Activities in Some Arab Cities: Participatory Greening for Neighborhoods” project, managed through the Urban Living Lab/Urban Policy Research Program and funded by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development. Methodologically, the study is based on desktop research and comparative analysis. It examines 66 international case studies of urban greening initiatives, selected from a broad geographical spectrum including Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Australia. These cases were analyzed to extract key lessons and identify critical success factors relevant to cities in the Arab region. The report distills global experiences into actionable institutional, strategic, and operational recommendations for municipalities, while also highlighting critical enablers, such as inter-sectoral coordination, participatory planning, and policy alignment. The goal is to provide local authorities and urban planners with evidence-based strategies to advance sustainable, inclusive, and climate-resilient urban environments

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