Green infrastructure, stormwater, and the financialization of municipal environmental governance

ABSTRACT

Municipalities large and small are grappling with how to address enduring water quality challenges stemming from the impermeability of much of the built environment and how to address shifting precipitation patterns due to climate change. Finding ways to fund and finance the redesign, retrofit, and adaptation of the built environment, however, presents a major obstacle in an environment of municipal fiscal austerity. In this paper, we examine how municipalities are adopting different fee structures and financial tools to pay for stormwater abatement through green and gray infrastructure and improve their capacity to deal with the impacts of climate change. Drawing on a survey of 233 municipalities and interviews with municipal leaders, we show that transitioning towards green infrastructure in municipal stormwater and climate change planning is a broad goal among most respondents, but stormwater fee systems are typically not sufficient for meeting regulatory mandates as well as the operation and maintenance costs needed to replace or repair urban water infrastructure. This shortfall has led many municipalities to use a host of other financial tools, such as credit and mitigation banking and social impact and green bonds. We suggest this shift has important implications for achieving sustainability and ensuring just transitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Green infrastructure
• financialization
• stormwater
• climate change adaptation
• environmental governance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua J. Cousins

Joshua J. Cousins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at SUNY-ESF. His research interests are in the areas of urban sustainability, urban-rural resource flows, and urban political ecology.

Dustin T. Hill

Dustin T. Hill is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program of Environmental Science at SUNY-ESF. His research is in the area of environmental policy with interest in socio-environmental impacts of industrial pollution, sustainable development of manufacturing, and environmental health.