Ecological versus social restoration? How urban river restoration challenges but also fails to challenge the science – policy nexus in the United Kingdom

Ecological restoration is an expanding area of science and practice for environmental management, but in urban environments in particular its challenge to traditional approaches can be limited because it is seen primarily as a scientific or practical endeavour rather than a social one. In general, the restoration literature, especially on the scientific and practitioner side, suffers from the ‘deficit model’ of public understanding and from a lack of fit between the expectations of restoration and policy workers and those of their local publics. Hence, the irony is that, although restorationists may be seen as radical in scientific and policy terms because of their challenge to the tradition of the ‘hard engineering’ of rivers, they are not radical in social science terms because they fail to challenge the tradition of technocratic environmental management of the public and its deficit model. We illustrate this through two examples of urban river restoration in England—the Alt and the Brent—and we conclude by suggesting how such problems might be addressed through more emphasis on and integration of social science within research and practical agendas for urban restoration projects.