A Methodology of Policy Assessment at the Municipal Level: Costa Rica´s Readiness for the Implementation of Nature-Based-Solutions for Urban Stormwater Management

Abstract

Nature-based-solutions (NBS) pursue a combination of economic, social, and environmental benefits that can meet municipal goals on stormwater and rapid urbanization problems. However, NBS have fallen behind in reaching to the political and legal framework, and with this, to a policy mix for urban stormwater sustainability. When looking closer at NBS, it becomes evident that they are loaded with many barriers, including institutional and political ones, as well as those that exist in the urban area social context. These barriers are also deepened by the lack of policy guidelines and few demonstration projects. In this respect, this paper combines the concepts of urban experiments and the policy feedback cycle (PFC) into a singular assessment tool. It´s goal is to assess Costa Rica’s municipal readiness in the implementation of NBS within the context of policy design and implementation. Therefore, this paper focusses on the first two stages of the PFC of an existing urban experiment to extract its policy insights for the successful replication of NBS projects. This novel method aims to contribute to the ongoing debate with respect to the ability of experimentation to prompt scalability and transferability of results. Hence, the New York City Green Infrastructure plan is considered as an urban experiment that promotes sustainable policy initiatives; while the PFC can identify and (re)formulate these policies initiatives and barriers into an adaptable policy guideline. Results indicate that sustainability policies at the municipal level should incorporate incentive mechanisms policies on (i) community involvement and communication; and (ii) transdisciplinary knowledge transfer between specialists and stakeholders. Finally, this paper suggests the inter-municipal cross-institutional collaboration and the recognition of external trigger events to incentivize a sustainable urban transition.

Mapping the Research Landscape of Nature-Based Solutions in Urbanism

“…The types included market-driven, stakeholder-driven, and citizen-driven. These new governance arrangements (i.e., adaptive governance, hybrid governance, and polycentric governance) have also been proposed as a locally unique approach in implementing the NBS practice, evidently provided from examples on climate change adaptation [82,83], urban biodiversity [84], urban water management [85][86][87], communal urban gardens [24] in EU region, and urban forestry [88] mostly in Melbourne Australia. However, hybrid governance with various choices faced risks of either improvements and deterioration of distributional, recognition, or procedural justice.…”

Highly Resolved Rainfall-Runoff Simulation of Retrofitted Green Stormwater Infrastructure at the Micro-Watershed Scale

“…Stormwater runoff generated from rooftops, front yards, streets and sidewalks is discharged directly into the street side curb-gutter system. In addition, most of the houses drain their greywater to the streets or directly to the catch basins through underground pipes [34,35]. Stormwater catch basins located at the end of every curb-gutter convey the runoff via manhole junctions to the primary sewer pipe, which finally discharges into the river.…”

Development and modelling of realistic retrofitted Nature-based Solution scenarios to reduce flood occurrence at the catchment scale

“…1). It was selected as an experimental site of the SEE-URBAN-WATER Research Project based on a participatory process where different Costa Rican municipalities proposed experimental sites to study the implementation of UGI at the neighbourhood scale, and it has been studied and monitored in detail for over 10 months since March 2019 (Neumann and Hack 2019;Towsif Khan et al 2020;Rose 2020;Fluhrer et al 2021). To assure the representativeness of the area, several considerations were taken into account: (1) The area makes up 2.4% of the catchment area, (2) onsite visits confirmed similar spatial characteristics at the site and the entire watershed, such as the width of streets, sidewalks and green verges, use of public space, building structures, distribution in space of roads of different hierarchy and unbuilt areas, (3) based on the analysis of remote sensing images, the history of urbanization process patterns occurred similarly in time and space, (4) the LULC distribution are similar at the site and watershed scale.…”

“…In this study, we argue that to enable more effective policy-making and promotion of UGI, there is a need for data about site-specific constraints for the implementation of UGI, which can provide more insights than arbitrarily considering different degrees of fictive UGI implementation. In the context of retrofitting UGI, considering physical, regulatory and social constraints to the implementation of UGI is especially relevant (Neumann and Hack 2019 ).…”