In 2015, China's national government initiated a Sponge City Programme to address its urban flood issues. A sponge city is a city built around the concept of managing water in an ecologically sustainable way. The intention is to improve urban resilience through rainwater capture, storage and use. This article applies a four-mode governance framework to analyze the programme. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the programme implementation and provides recommendations.

b utrecht centre for Water, oceans and sustainability law, faculty of law, economics and Governance, utrecht university, the netherlands; c utrecht university school of law, the netherlands ABSTRACT Due to increasingly frequent incidents of pluvial flooding of public spaces and private properties, climate-adaptive building and urban water management are gaining momentum in Dutch water governance. This study assesses the Dutch approach to urban water management by looking at the governance approaches of three of the largest Dutch municipalities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht. By analyzing the municipalities' governance approaches in a holistic way, paying attention to knowledge, organization and implementation, the research provides good practices in terms of different aspects of resilience as well as lessons regarding setting performance indicators in service levels, clarifying responsibility division, applying binding rules instead of soft policies, and more.

No abstract