Understanding whether existing legal and regulatory frameworks are conducive to NbS adoption and scale up is important when determining the institutional barriers feasibility of your Watershed Investment Program (WIP). These will not determine whether the WIP is feasible but rather shed light on what needs to be overcome or addressed to achieve it (e.g., energy, champions, resources). This will depend on the context in which you set your WIP. The key to this process is understanding who has the mandate to implement the WIP. Once this question is answered, you can assess whether the WIP is supported by:
- An enabling environment (policy)
- Knowledge (benefits of ecological infrastructure)
- Practice (supportive stakeholders who won’t get in your way)
The NbS space has multiple environmental, water sector, infrastructure, municipal, land and catchment dimensions. The overlapping mandates from these different spaces, and the multiple actors involved, makes regulatory and policy fragmentation inevitable. Conducting a Legal and Regulatory Mapping Process can help you understand how to overcome the fragmentation – or how your WIP could bridge some of these gaps.
A legal and regulatory policy evaluation is best done once you have identified your potential NbS portfolio and have mapped and analysed your stakeholders (Stakeholder Mapping Deep Dive), particularly government institutions.