Transition Pathways Towards Blue-Green Infrastructure: Adopting a System’s Approach

Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI), as a Nature-Based Solution, is one of the key approaches to addressing climate change impacts and urbanization challenges. By enhancing urban resilience through sustainable stormwater management and flood risk mitigation, BGI also delivers diverse ecosystem services. However, despite its multiple benefits and co-benefits, BGI still remains far from mainstream adoption.

We adopted Socio-Technical Transition (STT) as the theoretical framework of our research to investigate the barriers to BGI adoption and to explore the transition pathways to it. Using Sydney as a case study, we designed and facilitated two focus groups involving planners, decision-makers, stakeholders, developers, and engineers from various entities such as state and local governments, agencies, councils, and corporations. Thematic and content analysis of the focus group data was conducted and synthesized with existing published literature.

Building on these findings, we argue that this is a wicked problem and a complex situation that requires a Systems Thinking approach to holistically integrate all the findings into designing transition pathways to facilitate mainstreaming BGI.

The results indicate that transitions to BGI depend on regime shifts in five key domains: (1) Governance, institutional organisation and collaboration, (2) Economics and finance, (3) Knowledge, expertise and technical aspects, (4) Socio-cultural Attitudes, and (5) The planning regime. Acknowledging the complexity of this process, it should be approached as an iterative, continual learning experience—an "infinite loop" of probing, sensing, and responding. This research underscores the necessity of adopting STT through systemic interventions to overcome practical barriers and facilitate the widespread uptake of BGI in urban environments.