Integrating stormwater management to restore a stream: perspectives from a waterway management authority

Urban stormwater management is complex with diverse institutional responsibilities, imperfect regulation, and limited, often unclear accountabilities. Improving practices in that context requires strong leadership, long-term commitment, and lasting interorganizational relationships founded on trust. We summarize events that steered Melbourne’s waterway management authority to support a catchment-scale experiment markedly different from management applications or research approaches it had previously attempted. We highlight challenges, lessons learned, and subsequent institutional changes to stormwater management. Project challenges included: substantial investment in a small area from an organization with dispersed regional responsibilities, gaining intra- and interorganizational commitment, ongoing catchment development that counteracted management efforts, requirement for ongoing investment under short-term funding and political cycles, and absence of short-term measurable responses in stream health. These challenges led to design innovations, new catchment planning approaches, new best practice objectives, and new government policies that collectively changed approaches to stormwater management in our region. Critical to the initiation and success of this project, and probably to other similar projects, was building institutional commitment through long-term relationships between researchers and practitioners, and risk sharing made possible by co-investment.