Barriers to Wetland Restoration Implementation: A Case Study Approach in the California Bay-Delta

Policies and regulations in California increasingly promote wetland restoration as a multi-benefit environmental infrastructure solution to advance goals such as climate change adaptation, water resource management, public recreation access, and species protection. How do policy requirements and targets translate into completion of these projects, given complex relationships among public and private stakeholders? This paper uses a comparative case study approach to examine the process of implementing wetland restoration in the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento San Joaquin Delta Estuary. Case studies of 10 completed and in-progress restoration projects using stakeholder interviews and document analysis identify common barriers and opportunities across projects and landscapes. Applying governance and adaptation frameworks to project processes reveals tradeoffs for different multi-benefits, barriers from social, political, and environmental contexts, and evolving stakeholder relations and priorities over project lifetimes. Differences in needs and opportunities for restoration in the Bay and Delta further reveal complications for estuary-level environmental policy and management. Governance barriers unique to on-the-ground restoration projects reveal challenges for implementation of state and regional environmental policy on wetland restoration and climate change adaptation. We also demonstrate the value of extending collaborative governance and climate adaptation frameworks to environmental infrastructure projects that involve long time scales, multiple collaborative actors, and physical landscape impacts. As climate change adaptation increasingly requires adopting nature-based solutions, it is important to examine practitioner experiences with restoration as a form of policy implementation with unique social and ecological challenges that must be addressed.