Assessing Melbourne’s Governance Capacity to Resolve Water and Climate Adaptation Challenges

Abstract

Urban areas are prone to environmental threats which are getting more extreme due to the changing climate and rapid urbanisation. Water-related challenges such as flood risk, urban heat islands, water scarcity, waste water treatment and solid waste treatment require particular attention given the fact that cities are economic and communicational centres. Recently, there is an increasing focus on governance capacities in the field of water management as they are defined as essentials in order to tackle climate change adaptation and water-related challenges. Although the scientific literature provides many clues regarding the limiting and encouraging conditions determining governance capacity, there are only very few studies that describe coherent empirical approaches providing comprehensive strategic insight in the most effective and efficient pathways to improve the governance capacity. The Governance Capacity Framework, as part of the City Blueprint Approach, was created in order to fill this literature gap. It is a comprehensive and practical tool to assess the urban governance capacity needed to address challenges of water and climate change. The Governance Capacity Framework consists of nine governance conditions consisting of 27 indicators in total. Each indicator is scored by translating the information obtained from in-depth semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders and desk research into a score ranging from very limiting (- -) to very encouraging (++). For this purpose, a scoring method is developed for each indicator. In order to test the Governance Capacity Framework, Melbourne was chosen as it is a well performing city according to previous City Blueprint assessments. Also, the water industry of Melbourne is an interesting one having been through the Millennium Drought, a nearly 15-year-long dry period mainly in southeast Australia. Given the fact that there was not much experience about the application of the Governance Capacity Framework yet, the current study provides recommendations about the ideal setup of the analysis, how to overcome challenges and about the optimisation for practical and scientific use. Finally, Melbourne’s encouraging and limiting governance conditions have been identified. The most important recommendation about the setup is the recommended stakeholder analysis which includes a knowledge and role mapping followed by a stakeholder categorisation and a multi-level stakeholder selection. Six main challenges have been identified and nine related recommendations have been provided to overcome challenges experienced during the analysis of Melbourne: 1) A stakeholder analysis approach has been developed to improve the challenges of selecting the stakeholders and the interviewees; 2) A better use of existing networks using local experts and researchers, and creating media attention improve the challenge of low responsiveness; 3) More input from local experts ensures more accurate results and helps overcoming issues regarding the complexity of the governance capacity score chart; 4) A standard predefined question is formulated for each of the 27 indicators to improve the accuracy of the interview questions; 5) To ensure confidentiality, a coding system has been introduced to keep the interviewees unidentifiable; and 6) Interview planning has to be done largely before the actual field study to deal with time limitations. It is advised to create a tangible document containing the recommendations of all the Governance Capacity assessments to make future analyses even more efficient. A novel tool to measure awareness would further validate the results of indicators measuring the level of awareness. The upscaling potential would be worthwhile explored. Official involvement of city leaders should be considered. Melbourne is doing exceptionally well on the water scarcity challenge. Current research shows that by using the momentum of the Drought Melbourne has managed to build highly developed governance capacities in the field of water scarcity. On the other hand, Urban Heat Islands, solid waste management and flood risk are the challenges which need particular attention given their relatively low scores, especially regarding indicator 1.1 Community knowledge and indicator 5.3 Policy cohesion. In conclusion, future case studies can be conducted more efficiently by using the recommendations of the current study. Also, Melbourne may use the results in order to improve its governance capacities and share its best practices.