Abstract
Cities have historically benefited from and struggled with water. As a particular form of urban nature, water fundamentally shapes urban spaces through intricate interactions among technology, society, and the built environment. Over the course of industrialization and rapid urbanization, natural water systems have been continuously engineered and transformed, generating substantial benefits but also significant governance challenges. Globally, intensifying environmental degradation, resource vulnerabilities, and climate uncertainties have prompted cities to critically re-evaluate conventional urban water management approaches. Although various sustainability-oriented paradigms—such as Low Impact Urban Design, Integrated Water Resources Management, and Water Sensitive Cities—have been proposed, transitions from traditional, engineering-centric governance models have remained slow and uneven. Critical scholarship highlights that mainstream paradigms often oversimplify the inherent complexity and politics of water governance, leading to persistent inequalities and systemic shortcomings. Given such complexity, there is a pressing need for a more systemic and context-sensitive perspective in urban water governance research.In China, accelerating urbanization coupled with increasing climate risks has underscored the limitations of conventional water management and triggered the introduction of new concepts and policy instruments. Yet, the transitions towards sustainable urban water governance remains underexplored, particularly at the city scale. This thesis addresses this gap through a comprehensive case study of Ningbo, a city with a 7,000-year legacy of hydro social transformation. Employing a Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) lens and integrating insights from transitions theories and historical institutionalism, the study investigates Ningbo’s water governance through a multi-scalar analysis, encompassing historical evolution, contemporary governance institutions, and localized pilot experiments. The analysis is built upon data collected through archival research, in-depth semi-structured interviews with both state and non-state actors and field-based observation.
The findings reveal entrenched lock-ins within Ningbo’s socio-ecological-technical system (SETS), co-produced through a long history of engineering-centric interventions and fragmented institutional arrangements. While recent sustainability-oriented initiatives—most notably the River Chief System and the Five Water Co-Governance initiatives—have introduced new policy language and coordination mechanisms, they have largely been absorbed into, rather than reconfigured, the incumbent regime. Their transformative potential as deep leverage points has been attenuated, as they operate within pre-existing logics of campaign-style mobilization, short-term performance targets, and technocratic problem-solving.
This pattern is further illustrated through the micro-scale case of the Moon Lake ecological restoration. Here, even experiments explicitly framed around nature-based solutions and participatory governance succumbed to the same constraints, demonstrating how localized innovations remain circumscribed by systemic barriers. Together, the empirical evidence underscores that advancing meaningful sustainability transitions in urban water governance requires moving beyond the layering of new instruments. It demands strategic interventions that address and reconstitute the deep, co-evolutionary lock-ins across social, ecological, and technological domains. By examining Ningbo’s experience, this study provides insights for advancing integrated and resilient urban water governance in China and beyond.
| Date of Award | 15 Jul 2026 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Yu-Ting Tang (Supervisor), Andrea Palmioli (Supervisor) & Tim Heath (Supervisor) |
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