Regime Capability and Repair Priority in European Policy Portfolios for Urban Nature-Based Solutions

Abstract

Today, nature-based solutions in urban environments need to be regarded not only as projects but also as infrastructure for adaptation, restoration, moderation, cooling, public health, and overall quality of life. However, their increasing use relies on policy portfolios that should provide more than mere regulations, funding, or guidance documents. Rather, they have to build at least some level of capability within a broad set of institutional, economic, technical, cultural, and delivery conditions within which urban infrastructure is planned, built, financed, maintained, and valued. In this article, we introduce Regime-Capability Readiness Assessments for seven European case studies: European Union, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Our approach converts policy-instrument codes into four capability states – from vacant to anchored and then combines these indicators based on three metrics: sufficiency of instrument families, capped regime saturation, and bottlenecks protection. Consequently, the developed Implementation-Readiness and Repair Index provides information on how close each portfolio is to being capable of sustaining routine nature-based implementation. The European Union demonstrates the highest score, 96.6, due to sufficiency of all instrument families and absence of any vacuum or fragility in its regime dimensions. While Germany possesses strong capacity of policy making, it suffers in its implementation readiness due to the lack of functioning industry-network and physical technology elements. The United Kingdom and Sweden find themselves in an intermediate position with their distinctive needs for repair: Sweden lacks economic and usage practice capabilities, while the United Kingdom requires financial and funding repairs. Despite retaining strong knowledge base, the Netherlands still require further development. Finally, both Spain and Hungary require further strengthening of foundational elements. It turns out that capacity assessment should always consider the issue of capability development.