TY - JOUR
T1 - Governance assessment of a blue-green infrastructure project in a small size city in Belgium. The potential of Herentals for a leapfrog to water sensitive
AU - Casiano Flores, Cesar
AU - Vikolainen, Vera
AU - Crompvoets, Joep
N1 - Funding Information:
We express our gratitude to KU Leuven for supporting this research through a Postdoctoral Mandate (PDM/18/051) grant. We also would like to thank the CATCH collaborators for their support, especially Rik Scholiers who helped us to contact the members of the steering group of the Olympiadelaan project. We want to thank the reviewers, their comments helped to increase the quality of this article. The interviewed actors did not have any involvement in the study design, analysis, interpretation of the data, writing of the article or in the decision to submit the article for publication.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors
PY - 2021/10
Y1 - 2021/10
N2 - Climate change, population growth and land-use change have increased the risk of urban floods. Urban floods cause severe damages to cities and their inhabitants, and they are expected to increase over time. Consequently, urban adaptation is required to shift from traditional infrastructure to Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI). Until recently, studies on BGI implementation have centred around large cities in developed countries. Meanwhile, medium and small size cities have received less attention. According to the Urban Water Management Transition Framework (UWMTF), cities can leapfrog towards more ‘water sensitive’ practices. Although leapfrogging is context-dependent, our understanding of how governance factors support leapfrogging remains embryonic. This paper contributes to the scholarly understanding of the governance factors that support and limit leapfrogging. By applying the Governance Assessment Tool (GAT) and considering three catalytic factors that underpin leapfrogging, this research assessed the process to implement the BGI project named Olympiadelaan in Herentals, Belgium. Overall, the governance context support was assessed as moderate. The regional and provincial governments play a key role in reaching this moderate level of support. This moderate support helps the city level to speed up its urban water management transition, but it is not enough to skip the states in the UWMTF.
AB - Climate change, population growth and land-use change have increased the risk of urban floods. Urban floods cause severe damages to cities and their inhabitants, and they are expected to increase over time. Consequently, urban adaptation is required to shift from traditional infrastructure to Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI). Until recently, studies on BGI implementation have centred around large cities in developed countries. Meanwhile, medium and small size cities have received less attention. According to the Urban Water Management Transition Framework (UWMTF), cities can leapfrog towards more ‘water sensitive’ practices. Although leapfrogging is context-dependent, our understanding of how governance factors support leapfrogging remains embryonic. This paper contributes to the scholarly understanding of the governance factors that support and limit leapfrogging. By applying the Governance Assessment Tool (GAT) and considering three catalytic factors that underpin leapfrogging, this research assessed the process to implement the BGI project named Olympiadelaan in Herentals, Belgium. Overall, the governance context support was assessed as moderate. The regional and provincial governments play a key role in reaching this moderate level of support. This moderate support helps the city level to speed up its urban water management transition, but it is not enough to skip the states in the UWMTF.
KW - Blue-green infrastructure
KW - Leapfrogging
KW - Small size city
KW - Urban water transition
KW - Water governance
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85108987977&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cities.2021.103331
DO - 10.1016/j.cities.2021.103331
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85108987977
SN - 0264-2751
VL - 117
JO - Cities
JF - Cities
M1 - 103331
ER -