From Watershed Ambitions to Parcel-Scale Retrofits: Rethinking Rain-Gardens in Climate Resilience Planning

Rain-gardens are widely promoted as nature-based solutions (NbSs) within blue-green infrastructure (BGI), yet their contribution to broader resilience objectives raises questions about how localized projects are governed, maintained, and connected to watershed planning. This study investigates these relationships through an interpretive qualitative case study in New Jersey, USA, integrating seven semi-structured interview sessions with ten professional stakeholders, ten professional lectures, technical and regulatory documents, and field documentation of 18 site records comprising 24 rain-gardens. Dunnett and Clayden (2007) served as a separate landscape-design comparator. Stormwater management emerged as the principal implementation rationale, while ecological, educational, and public-space objectives were generally complementary. Field observations revealed differences in vegetation establishment, apparent upkeep, and physical condition. Across stakeholder accounts, maintenance responsibility, funding, continuity of personnel and institutional knowledge, technical expertise, and interorganizational coordination emerged as interdependent capacities, synthesized as stewardship’s invisible infrastructure. A central planning tension concerned the delivery of discrete site-scale projects despite broader watershed and climate-resilience ambitions. New Jersey guidance and watershed-organized initiatives demonstrate existing pathways for coordination, while practitioner accounts identify uneven capacities to sustain these arrangements. The study contributes an integrated understanding of rain-gardens as socio-ecological and institutional infrastructure and identifies context-sensitive, transferable planning considerations for watershed-informed siting, landscape design, continuing stewardship, and institutional coordination. These findings inform NbS and BGI implementation for sustainable water management, urban resilience, and climate adaptation, emphasizing coordinated planning and long-term management rather than completed installations alone.