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During Shanghai's two-month lockdown in 2022, residential community members coped with stress collectively. For many, this experience of intensive community engagement was a learning process with regard to the deliberation of community affairs and collective problem-solving. This article explores how an embryonic sense of collectivity manifested in the expression of shared and solitary sentiments in community engagement and how this collective sense easily fractured during concrete community deliberation and collective decision-making. Despite problems common to collective action, these residents' barriers to community engagement were largely shaped by extant government policy and grassroots institutional structure, sparking conflicts, cynicism, and mistrust, as evidenced by their narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two trends are gaining prevalence across China: (1) NGO needs for funding in order to survive and (2) the transformation of the government and private foundations into major NGO donors. This study explores grassroots NGOs' experience with the government's purchase-of-services contracting and private foundations' grant schemes in Shanghai, Beijing and Sichuan. The research findings show that two opposite effects of the funding game are simultaneously felt: growing space for diversity and increasing isomorphic pressures. The two donor types have jointly created a result-driven and institutionalized environment in which NGOs easily lose sight of their missions and uniqueness. Nonetheless, despite finding their options extremely limited, NGOs adopt constantly evolving, multifaceted resource strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban green spaces provide regulating ecosystem services (RS) to humans and contribute to biodiversity conservation under urbanization pressure. However, trade-offs arise while making development decisions in urban green space planning, as the prioritization of enhancing RS may not always contribute to biodiversity conservation and vice versa. Therefore, achieving a balance between these trade-offs becomes essential in promoting conservation strategies that maximize win-win outcomes for both biodiversity and RS, ultimately leading to sustainable urban development. A practical approach to strike this balance is to prioritize specific species as surrogates for population protection, thereby benefiting co-occurring species and promoting the maintenance of a high RS level. To explore this approach, we conducted monthly bird surveys in green spaces over five years along an urbanization gradient in Shanghai, China. Based on the monthly bird dataset, to begin, we used indicator species analysis to identify bird indicators for the monthly RS (which were calculated from an economic perspective). Following from that, the umbrella index was used to prioritize umbrella species for biodiversity conservation. Finally, surrogate species were selected on the basis of their identification as both RS indicators and umbrella species. Consequently, seven common species were identified as surrogates in Shanghai. The RS indicator species were mainly omnivores and tree-nesting, with most umbrella species belonging to this subset. Furthermore, understanding the population dynamics of surrogate species could provide information on overall biodiversity and RS status, facilitating the optimization of management strategies and policies in cities. Our integrated approach, which combines indicator and umbrella species, provides a tool for establishing connections between ecosystem service maintenance and biodiversity conservation. This approach is useful in promoting planning strategies to conserve biodiversity while ensuring sustainable provision of ecosystem services and can be applied in the sustainable management of human-dominated landscapes. • Bird assemblages were censused in 12 green spaces over 60 months in Shanghai, China. • Air quality, climate, waste treatment, and water flow services were evaluated. • Common birds were identified as indicators of regulating ecosystem services. • Protecting the population size of umbrella bird species can inform high ecosystem services. • Surrogate bird species can be used to link biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]