Thanks for your response. I was also thinking much about it and was not able to find a nice idea how to get this working. 

The problem is, that we loose the local-namespace information as soon as we leave the context of the function, where the class was defined in. This information is not stored in the function object of the method, we want to get the type hints from. The only open question, I have in this context is: 

Why can python resolve the reference to class A (also a inner class, but no forward declaration)? Is there any chance to use the same mechanism also for forward declared references?

Beside from this question, I will give you my thoughts, how I think this issue could be addressed:

 - What we need is the local namespace information from the function, where the inner class was defined in. This is not stored from python in the function object of this class (but __global__ is stored). 
 - Maybe any upcoming python version could store this information in __local__ ? So maybe we could clone this ticket to the python core in order to address this?

 - As long as python is not storing this information, a workaround could be used: We could define a function decorator, which adds the attribute __local__ to a function object. I think about this syntax:

class InnerClass():
    @store_namespace(locals())
    def method() -> 'InnerClass':
        ...

- The get_type_hints function is then checking for the __local__ attribute and if it exits it is passed to the function, which resolves the forward declaration.

This workaround is not beautiful, since it requires manual work for those methods (adding the function decorator to those methods). Furthermore - without knowing the internals of the get_type_hints function - this workaround is not straight forward and easy to understand. So it needs to be carefully documented and even then I expect confusing questions on StackOverflow or other communities. 

However, it is a quite rare case that someone really needs to use inner classes. Normally one could simply put the class in the global namespace. But when this happens and there is really a need for it, than this workaround would make it possible. Furthermore, checking a __local__ attribute of the function object would be a nice preparation for a feature request to the python core, which should store the reference to the local namespace for every function object, without using any decorators.

What do you think?