This chapter presents innovation pathways for urban nature and nature-based solutions that are appearing in cities. Innovation pathways are journeys that involve key drivers, decision-making junctures, agents, and opportunities. The chapter provides a typology of nature-based innovations and unpacks the underlying conditions enabling and constraining the mainstreaming of these innovations through the nature-based solutions innovation system framework. It also discusses localised innovation processes. The chapter provides potential explanations for path dependencies through urban development regimes that enable or constrain these initiatives and systems. From these three sets of dynamics, the chapter aims to provide an understanding about what shapes the pathways through which urban nature and nature-based innovations emerge and open the gateway to potential intervention points towards sustainability. The chapter presents recent innovation pathways for urban nature through case studies from Leidsche Rijn water system in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Little France Park in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, to explore the interconnections between nature, innovation and urban sustainability that indicate the emergence of a global agenda.

In Chapter 11, the author takes readers through the process of creating and using holistic and analytic rating scales for performance assessments. The author uses an example of an assessment that a team of language teachers created for measuring the abilities of young Saudi learners who were learning English as a second language in the United States. The author discusses multiple approaches to creating rating scales, including adapting existing scales, patterning scales after course standards, a theory-based approach where developers use language and assessment theory to create scales, and a performance-driven approach where developers use test taker language samples to identify distinguishing characteristics among test taker abilities. The author discusses three sample writing performances of the young Saudi learners and shows how the teachers used them to create the scales. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the process of creating and using computer scoring systems for performance assessments.

This chapter provides critical insights in the important role urban citizens play in urban nature and nature-based solutions. More specifically, it focuses on how citizens and communities interact with and value nature in cities, what resources they offer and need for this interaction, with what associated costs and benefits, and under what conditions. It starts with a discussion of the three key forms of justice (procedural, recognitional, and distributional) that are addressed by and constitute reasons for enhanced citizen participation. Building on this discussion, the chapter then outlines different forms of participation that have been applied in the design and implementation of nature-based solutions. Challenges and obstacles are discussed before concluding with suggestions for how to tackle them. The chapter presents and seeks to inspire different novel approaches of engagement and their associated benefits, which can range from local community empowerment, creation of greater senses of ownership, enhancement of urban citizenship and belonging, and decreasing social exclusion. The chapter engages with two case studies to illustrate its key messages: urban gardens in Leipzig, Germany, and Roerplein pocket park in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

In Chapter 3, the author introduces the concepts of context, purpose, and impact. The chapter begins with a discussion of sociopolitical, cultural, and educational contextual influences on language assessments. The author uses well-known language assessment examples of these effects, including Norton and Stein’s Monkey Passage and how sociopolitical factors affected a group of Black African high school students when they took a reading assessment. The author uses Hall’s framework that considers people’s tendencies to act in certain ways depending on their cultural backgrounds and considers how these tendencies are important when designing and using an assessment for a particular purpose. The author also discusses levels of impact that an assessment can have on individuals, including its effect on test takers and their families, people who have a close relationship with test takers, and even people who do not have a close relationship with test takers.

This chapter sets the context for understanding how urban nature and nature-based solutions are governed by defining governance, highlighting different types and forms of governance, and discussing the roles that different actors play in various governance arrangements while putting the governance of urban nature into a multi-level perspective. The chapter provides a typology of governance approaches, through which the roles, constellations, and responsibilities of actors, financial sources, and institutional arrangements are outlined and discussed. It then highlights the challenges and opportunities for governing urban nature and proposes a set of eight principles and values underpinning effective governance as well as exploring the challenges and potential conflicts arising among these principles when many of them are applied at the same time. The chapter engages with two case studies to illustrate its key messages: Isar River Restoration in Munich, Germany, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens, Greece.

In Chapter 10, the author introduces performance assessments: test activities that require test takers to use language in a manner similar to how they use language in the target language use situation. The chapter describes and discusses the appropriate uses of several types of tasks: prepared oral presentation, knowledge-based, retell, summary, synthesis, roleplay, interview, paired oral discussion, group oral discussion, elicited imitation, and picture tasks. The chapter also discusses the delivery of performance assessment tasks, including face-to-face, virtual, and computerized delivery models. The author compares and contrasts oral communication assessments in video-mediated and virtual environments. The chapter compares spoken dialog systems, electronic systems that can orally interact with humans, to complex language-processing models, such as ChatGPT, that generate language from large databases. The chapter includes an appendix for using ChatGPT to help create a performance assessment.