Beyond single drops: How local authorities can improve the uptake of nature-based solutions for water governance?

A substantial body of literature documents the benefits of nature-based solutions in urban areas, while local authorities often struggle to translate these insights into practice. This gap persists because governance arrangements remain fragmented, responsibilities are distributed across multiple institutions, and decision-making is frequently constrained by short-term planning and limited long-term empirical evidence. While nature-based solutions are increasingly promoted as effective adaptive measures, it remains insufficiently understood how specific local governance conditions enable or hinder their sustained and institutionalised implementation. The aim of this paper is to examine just how governance structures operate in a specific context to shed light on the performance of water-related nature-based solutions in coastal cities and to improve knowledge regarding specific adjustments in the institutional setup or decision-making process, which could be capable of supporting the uptake of nature-based solutions in the urban context. The research draws on a set of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders from the coastal city of Piran, Slovenia, representing diverse expertise and responsibilities in municipal spatial planning, water and wastewater management, environmental and cultural heritage protection, and civil society. The paper synthesises how participants understand governance barriers, how coordination occurs across institutional levels, and how knowledge from past projects informs current decisions. These empirical, locally grounded insights are compared with barriers widely discussed in the literature to assess the relevance of literature to the real-world case study and offer insights into making the literature more actionable. Preliminary findings show that strengthening communication between municipal departments, public utilities and external actors is essential for maintaining continuity beyond project-based cycles and for embedding nature-based solutions into local practice, but that the preference for nature-based solutions is often tied to the personal views rather than an institutional mandate. By providing fine-grained empirical insight into how governance barriers operate in practice, this study contributes to advancing more durable, learning-oriented water governance pathways for nature-based solutions in coastal cities. This research, part of the ongoing consortium-based European project, seeks to generate new granular insights on the operation of nature-based solutions in practice with the view of developing a more durable water governance pathway.