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Policymakers increasingly integrate urban pluvial flood risk management into multiple strategies, acknowledging that local contexts and the actors involved are crucial. However, the literature on the decision-making processes of community-based pluvial flood risk management sheds little light on how local formal and informal actors relate to each other. This paper contributes to filling this research gap by exploring the interdependency between local authorities and community residents from a multilevel governance perspective. Two cases, based in Pearl River Delta Cities, are analysed to explore actors’ interactions locally in the Chinese Sponge City Program, a national programme for urban pluvial flood risk management. The comparative study of the two cases leads to four conclusions. First, the Sponge City Programat the local level can be viewed as multilevel governance. Second, triggered by the goal set by the national government and the local contexts, local authorities see the benefit of locally integrating the Sponge City Programinto an integrated and area-specific plan, emphasizing the importance of institutional assertiveness. Third, tensions and synergies exist in the interaction process between local authorities and residents that will have to be recognized and embraced and, where necessary, converted from constraining to enabling factors. Fourth, institutional barriers still dominate locally in the Sponge City Programbecause of a lack of support for cross-boundary cooperation and public participation. To span these boundaries, policymakers should be more open to changing the perspective from ‘planning for people’ to ‘planning with people’.