Abstract

Community-led urban interventions are shaped by uncertainties that affect their initiation, development, operation, and short- and long-term outcomes. Existing research offers insights into participatory practices but lacks a comprehensive framework for understanding how community initiatives evolve under uncertain conditions. In this paper, we develop a realist, process-oriented framework that integrates the logic model, uncertainty analysis, and context-mechanism-outcome configurations to examine the lifecycle of urban interventions and the effects of community-based mechanisms on these processes. The framework distinguishes six types of uncertainty: ambiguity, variability, event, systemic, ecological, and epistemic. It is then applied to seven community-led urban interventions across diverse contexts. The findings suggest that specific uncertainties can be associated with particular mechanisms: ambiguity with sense-making and co-design; variability with coordination, stewardship, and adaptive learning; and systemic uncertainty with sense-making. Additionally, similar mechanisms can produce different outcomes when operating in different contexts. The main output of the paper is a realist evaluation framework for understanding how community-led urban interventions respond to different types of uncertainty and support the social, environmental, governance, and learning dimensions of sustainability while helping practitioners and policymakers mobilize appropriate mechanisms under specific conditions of uncertainty.