Breaking out of the silo: collaborative approaches to implementing blue-green infrastructure in urban areas

Abstract

Blue-green infrastructure (BGI) represents a subtype of nature-based solutions that leverages the collective benefits of urban green spaces and urban water management for the purpose of climate change adaptation. The success of BGI as an alternative or as a complement to the current ‘gray’ urban infrastructure is, however, hampered by existing urban planning structures. Given the numerous advantages that BGI can offer, it is essential to integrate different sectors and policy domains in order to ensure its effective implementation. This represents a novel challenge in urban planning, as the responsibility for providing different parts of urban infrastructure is traditionally split across specialized departments. In order to accelerate the successful establishment of BGI through stakeholder collaboration, the infrastructure transition canvas is employed to identify and structure coordination gaps between key actors, with the objective of developing new mechanisms of collaboration. This results in four principal coordination tasks for BGI projects: (i) coordination for value creation, (ii) coordination of stakeholders with formal decision-making power, (iii) engaging stakeholders who have no formal mandate, and (iv) intermediation. In conclusion, the paper presents a synthesis of the conditions required for stakeholder collaboration that contribute to redistributing the roles and responsibilities to facilitate successful BGI implementation.