Prior to the restoration, Mayesbrook Park was unloved and underused. For the project to be a success, it was thus important to reconnect the neighbouring communities with the park and its planned refurbishment. Extensive public consultation helped the partners address local concerns about the park and served to ensure significant social benefits, such as an increased number of visitors in the park, as well as a greater feeling of safety. As the park was home to criminal activities and antisocial behavior prior to reformation, the use of an on-site ranger has helped to reduce this threat and provide greater comfort to visitors and the surrounding communities. In addition, Natural England also worked with the schools to see how the park could be most relevant to their needs and based new natural play facilities and trail markers in the on designs by these children. The improvement in landscape, social and aesthetic value helped shape new recreation facilities and enabled better access for park users.

An extensive and iterative process of stakeholder engagement was initiated during the design and execution of this project. The process involved a ‘rolling programme’ of consultation with local residents, representatives from the local school, practitioners, city staff and many others in order to build awareness about the SuDS retrofit, its benefits and costs, and to obtain public perspectives on the desired design. This included regular meetings, community workshops, and informal gatherings at sports and cultural events. The approach became increasingly open and consultative, with approximately one fifth of the tenants in the area having participated in dialogue meetings about the project. Amongst other topics, safety issues related to open water areas (e.g. retention pools) were discussed with residents as well as the potential loss of particular recreational opportunities in the area. In many cases, comments and concerns from stakeholders were taken into account and addressed in redesigned SuDS plans.

While the core purpose of the project was to address flooding related to an over-utilized combined sewage system, the neighbourhood of Augustenborg was also in a state of socioeconomic decline prior to the urban regeneration project. Thus, the generation of socio-economic benefits became central to the project’s goals, such as improving the livability and aesthetics of the neighborhood, alongside biodiversity objectives. Furthermore, the project is part of a larger regeneration initiative within the neighbourhood of Augustenborg, which is also nested within ambitious sustainability plans for the City of Malmö. More specifically, the ‘Eco-city Augustenborg’ initiative aimed to transform Augustenborg into a socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable settlement. Ultimately, the work has represented a significant transformation of the neighborhood, and has become emblematic of a more pervasive shift towards sustainability. It has also resulted in the development of several businesses in the area of water innovation. Media coverage and public relations value are viewed as being additional benefs to the city and its residents.

A partnership between the Malmö housing company, Malmö water and city planners was a critical ingredient in the implementation of this project. Technical expertise was required from each of these partners to ensure appropriate design, and funding of the project was also collaboratively provided. Further components of this successful partnership included stakeholder engagement, the presence of sophisticated technical expertise, and a high level policy directive in support of experimentation. Understanding of the local ecosystems was not critical, but project designers had to possess a very detailed understanding of the frequency and severity of local floods.

Within the Wallasea Project, land-raising and landscape engineering was innovatively approached by creating a novel public private partnership. Materials from the Crossrail tunneling project were transported to a low-lying coastal area at high risk of flooding, in order to raise the land. The project thus established a precedent for using largely waste material generated by a major infrastructure project to meet biodiversity conservation and climate change adaptation aims elsewhere. Financing stemmed from both the private company Crossrail as well as from the Environment Agency, with all parties profiting due to the economic as well as environmental benefits set off by recycling the leftover materials. With Crossrail on board as a delivery partner, the project represents a partnership between Europe's largest civil engineering project and Europe's largest intertidal habitat creation project.

The implementation process began with the founding of the PHOENIX-See Entwicklungsgesellschaft (EG ) - as a subsidiary of the municipal utility company - to manage this large-scale project. An external project leader was employed and expert engineering offices were contracted. The EG was involved on all topics relating to water management of the Emscher and the Pheonix lake. From the governmental side, a large number of agencies were involved in the process. Public participation was realized through formal and informal meetings and discussions. Of importance were also the feasibility and assessment studies initiated in 2001 to improve the design of the solution and convince decision makers that the risks involved were acceptable. The plan was finally approved in 2005, with digging operations starting in 2006. A year later, the new wastewater sewer was finished and in 2009 the renatured Emscher started to flow in its new bed. Finally, the lake was flooded in 2010 and officially opened in 2011. The construction of houses along the lake started in this period and in 2013 the Entwicklungsgesellschaft “delivered” the lake back to the city of Dortmund.

As this solution serves various goals and meets several objectives, it was possible to secure sufficient funding from diverse parties, domains and funding bodies to cover the entire implementation of the project. In the case of the creation of Lake Phoenix, this included funding for water management from the water board; funding for ecology from the ecological funding program by the federal state; funding for urban development from etc. The water board, for instance, provided the amount of money that was already budgeted for the construction of a flood retention basin. This basin was not needed anymore, as the lake solution already provided the required flood retention function. Some additional potential funding sources were not even used in the end, because it would have slowed down the marketing of the real estate and would have tied the project to certain restrictions, which were not desired by the decision-makers.

Top-Down is the process to create broader political awareness of the issue. It includes advocacy for national and international support. Commonly a concept paper that explains the problem initiates this process with further research to support and document the issues. It is important to appeal to the news media, as their attention is necessary to heighten the political awareness of the issues and to convey the information to the public, resulting in the creation of a broader public demand for action. Media attention mobilizes national and international engagement and can foster domestic and international resource mobilization. In our experience, public opinion plays a decisive role in dictating the political agenda to local leaders as well as national decision makers.

Local stakeholders learn to become environmental leaders. They learn about their water reality. When people understand the local problems and their community's responsibility, they can meet and engage with similar groups of stakeholders from other communities across the conflict. The common ground for these cross conflict meetings is the safeguard of the shared watershed and the communities engage in productive meetings to identify solutions. Together they identify projects that speak to the self-interest of both sides. Through this process, the communities gain the capacity to advance solutions even within a turbulent political environment. In most cases, the combination of a strong youth program and outspoken adult leadership creates the political will of mayors and other municipal leaders to get involved.

The DEA NRM land user incentive programme, along with co finance from CSA donors, allows CSA to fund alien clearing in priority catchments. Eco rangers then employed to work with farmers, on rotation grazing, they control grazing of livestock and ensure rotational grazing is enforced. They keep areas alien free, they help protect cattle through mobile kraaling and also gather data on cattle and biodiversity and monitor veld condition and determine when an area needs to be closed from grazing. They also ensure compliance with rested areas and report those not compliant. They also ensure protection of biodiversity against poaching. Also ecorangers play a crucial role in ensuring that alien invasive plants do not come back and are responsible for pulling out seedlings that grow back. It is their responsibility as well to rehabilitate degraded areas where erosion dongas are beginning to appear. Incentives for land owners include not only ecorangers but also vaccinations and access to markets through auctions. Springs and streams that have dried started flowing again after these approaches have been implemented.