Identifying barriers to decentralized stormwater infrastructure implementation at different levels of urban flood governance – A case study in Eastern Pennsylvania, US.

Stormwater green infrastructure (GI) has been applied as a method to address urban flooding for over forty years. However, GI has not yet been widely utilized across the US. Prior studies identified some challenges with technical, engineering, and socioeconomic aspects of GI, but detailed examination of non-scientific papers to identify and analyze real-world barriers that may hinder the implementation of GI has not yet been done. To achieve this goal, we conducted a meta-analysis of 351 public documents from federal, state, and 62 municipalities in Eastern Pennsylvania to systematically review the support of different levels of government for implementing GI. We summarized barriers in three categories: 1) governance and policy: failure to integrate GI into existing stormwater management policies due to unclearly defined responsibility and infrequent policy updates, 2) stormwater fees and credits: inequity in stormwater fee structures and debate of stormwater credits connected to GI, and 3) public education and outreach: most municipal governments provide little or no stormwater and GI-related information to their residents, but some municipalities with higher population density have tried to offer more. These barriers will restrain the original intention and vision of GI implementation and cause difficulties in effectively conveying GI's information from the federal and state levels to municipalities and residents. Our discussion highlights these difficulties of GI implementation at all governmental levels and shed light on potential solutions to address these barriers. • Barriers to Green Infrastructure (GI) adoption in the US context are identified. • Qualitative and quantitative methods are conducted to identify GI barriers. • Three categories of GI barriers are summarized at different levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]