2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

Stormwater is a complex and multi-scaled environmental problem. Efforts to sustainably govern and manage stormwater extend within and beyond city boundaries, levels of policy, and across organizations. While much research exists on the technical solutions surrounding stormwater, the social and governance dimensions of stormwater are not as well explored. In this full presentation panel, we will bring together research on and practice in stormwater policy and management to explore the opportunities and constraints surrounding sustainable stormwater governance. The papers to be presented will touch on important issues of technical and financial challenges to local stormwater management, the benefits and challenges of decentralized stormwater governance, and the role of organizational motivations in guiding stormwater-related activities. A coordinated discussion following the presentations will integrate perspectives from environmental policy, environmental sociology, college programming and education, and watershed organizations. Below, we provide abstracts of the papers to be included in the session. 

The Role of Colleges and Universities in Overcoming Barriers to Green Infrastructure and Other Sustainable Stormwater Initiatives

Katherine Meierdiercks

Sustainable approaches to stormwater management such as green infrastructure and low impact development are wonderful ideas in theory. They can reduce runoff, improve water quality, and provide green space in urban communities. But these same communities can face several challenges when working to implement them. The challenges could be legal and regulatory, technical, financial, or lack of support from members of the community.   Through educational and research projects, College and Universities can play an important role in helping communities to overcome some of these challenges, particularly technical and financial. At the same time, sustainable stormwater educational and research projects produce students with technical knowledge as well as provide the training necessary to prepare them to address the world’s complex water problems.

Urban Stormwater Management and Democracy: An Interpretive Policy Analysis of a Governance Network

Katharine Travaline

The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) is the first US water utility to enact a city-wide green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) approach to managing urban stormwater. Doing so, PWD must address the interconnection of its stormwater with the rest of the City, including its land and its infrastructure – where its residents live, work, and play. The water utility must therefore work, in one way or another, with the city agencies that manage those spaces. In other words, PWD has set out to manage the City’s stormwater in a governance network, in which multiple city agencies and public entities and individuals work together. Some believe such networked forms of policymaking to be more democratic forms of governing as they connect a broad range of actors within the policy process, thus overcoming the limitations of representative democracy as well as addressing and harnessing the high levels of complexity and uncertainty of today’s environmental problems.  I analyze these inter-agency collaborations to explore such claims, asking How can PWD, working within a traditionally fragmented city government, foster meaningful partnerships with other city agencies? To answer these questions, I conducted an interpretive policy analysis of the Green City, Clean Waters program, employing methods of document analysis, participant-observation, and interviewing. I identify some of the benefits as well as the challenges of this decentralized policymaking process. PWD is addressing the failures of the City’s traditional practices of government as it implements an inclusive and adaptive policy process. At the same time it faces the daunting tasks of managing a plurality of, often conflicting, interests and identities as well as navigating blurred lines of accountability. I suggest that lessons drawn from this interpretive policy analysis through the lens of deliberative democracy may enhance the democratic policymaking processes of the City’s stormwater governance.

Nine Mile Run: Restoration and Stormwater Challenges in Pittsburgh, PA

Sara Powell

Nine Mile Run is one of very few free-flowing streams left in Pittsburgh, PA. Despite the fact that roughly two-thirds of the stream has been culverted over and many watershed residents are unaware of its existence below their homes and businesses, the stream is a unique urban asset for the region providing recreational opportunities and other important ecosystem services. In 2006, the US Army Corps of Engineers completed the $7.7 million Nine Mile Run Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration, a project designed to ameliorate decades of neglect and allow the free-flowing portion of the stream to better respond to the high volume of stormwater it receives during wet weather. 

The restoration has improved many aspects of the stream’s ecological health. However, during wet weather, Nine Mile Run is still quickly inundated with stormwater, flooding it with pollutants and causing stream bank erosion. Sewage overflows also occur regularly during wet weather because of aging and inadequate storm and sanitary sewer systems.

This presentation will discuss efforts of the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association to protect the restoration and involve local leaders and volunteers in community greening initiatives in the upper watershed. Lessons learned will be shared from various projects, including a large residential rain barrel program, development of a social enterprise focused on stormwater management, and involvement in regional discourse on green versus gray methods of stormwater control.

Stormwater governance without substantive meaning? Organization motives and local stormwater policy in Utah

Andrea Armstrong

Municipal and special district governments are required to implement and enforce many forms of local stormwater policies under state and federal water quality statues.  Within this regulatory framework, municipal stormwater programs are also adapting to biophysical change and, in many cases, urban expansion. One form of local stormwater policy is the stormwater management plan, in which municipalities outline their water quality, programmatic, and infrastructure goals. A second form of policy is infrastructure, which is physical representations of organizational policies and goals. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the reasons why municipalities make adaptations to their stormwater management plans.  I assess the drivers of local policy adaptation within two theoretical frameworks: the adaptive cycle of resilience thinking, and organizational ecology. I apply these theoretical frameworks to online survey responses from municipalities throughout Utah. In identifying the important reasons for taking on policy changes, I also examine how adaptation relates to use of innovative or ‘green’ infrastructure.