Supportive governance for climate resilient city strategies: Enabling practitioners to assess their context

With increasing awareness and impacts of climate change, many cities strive for the ability to absorb and recover from shocks and disruptions, a goal that is often called “climate resilience” nowadays. In northwest Europe, working towards making a city climate resilient implies the design and adjustment of city-wide strategies, which often involve water-related projects and require cross-sectoral collaboration and coordination. The contribution of strategies to becoming climate resilient depends on whether they can be realized in practice. The “governance assessment tool (GAT)” is designed to gain insight in this issue. Are the social and administrative circumstances helpful or restrictive for realizing a strategy in practice? Answering this question is not only important during implementation. When designing or adjusting a strategy, one should reckon with its feasibility in practice. The GAT has been applied in a few dozen cases in more than 20 countries, mostly in the field of water governance. However, until now it served as a “researchers’ tool”, which requires a good understanding of underlying theory. In the CATCH project we have developed a “practitioners’ variant” that is streamlined and specified to be used without such theoretical knowledge. CATCH (water sensitive Cities: the Answer To CHallenges of extreme weather events) is an international collaboration project that is being implemented between 2017 and 2021 within the scope of the EU Interreg North Sea Region Programme. The project focuses on the specific context and needs of midsize cities for climate change adaptation. It brings together a team of 12 partners from six countries (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). Its overall objective is to demonstrate and accelerate the redesign of urban water management of the seven midsize cities involved to become climate resilient. The conceptual basis of the project is the water sensitive cities (WSC) framework, which addresses the multi-sectoral and multi-functional aspects of water governance in cities. For this purpose, the project team has co-designed an online decision support tool (DST). The DST includes four components, one of which is the adapted GAT. To develop the DST, the CATCH project team adopted a transdisciplinary research approach involving academic and non-academic participants in the knowledge co-production process. The non-academic participants from local and regional authorities in the CATCH partner organizations were encouraged to question the ideas or concepts that were raised during the project and to promote their own knowledge. An iterative process was followed so that all participants could learn from each other and develop a common understanding and shared language. This paper will focus on the experiences of the practitioners with the application of the GAT and the results it produced regarding the degree of supportiveness or restrictiveness for realizing their climate change adaptation strategies. The seven CATCH partner cities will be compared in terms of their knowledge production process and the assessment results. We aim to create insights into possible patterns across the seven cases with regards to different governance dimensions and assessment criteria.