Governing forward : thinking through law and governance to enable wider use of nature-based solutions in cities

Climate change and accelerating urbanization of human populations are increasing uncertainty and creating additional challenges to environmental and social well-being in cities. These changes require new and different approaches in development and governance of cities to achieve urban sustainability and urban resilience. This dissertation considers how governance in cities conditions the use of nature-based solutions (NbS) to address urban environmental challenges. I use empirical case studies of the experiences of two cities implementing nature-based solutions to understand the municipal governance regime around the use of nature-based solutions in each city and offer proposals to modify the relevant legal frameworks to better support use of the solutions. The first study uses a governance assessment tool previously applied by scholars in a variety of water governance and policy contexts to analyze the municipal governance regime for the implementation of NbS in Austin, Texas. The second paper applies an “emergence frontier” framework to explore how legal and institutional factors affect the emergence of adaptive governance and the implementation of NbS in Valladolid, Spain. The third paper explores the literature on adaptive law and the role of law in adaptive governance, and then uses the case studies developed in the first two papers as contexts for proposing specific changes to each city’s regulatory framework to facilitate the wide-spread use of nature-based solutions and to prompt decisionmakers to consider how regulatory frameworks, more generally, can be made more adaptable and better able to govern shifting social-ecological systems. In exploring the concept of adaptive law and considering how adaptive qualities and mechanisms in law and governance may be applied in municipal contexts to support the use of NbS in urban areas, I seek to contribute to filling a gap in scholarship concerning how law and governance arrangements can be shifted to facilitate the use of innovative solutions to integrate nature into cities and promote healthy urban social-ecological systems.Public Affair