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Doctoral thesis2025Open access

Management of green infrastructure in public organizations : considering cross-sectoral demands and long-term perspectives

Sunding, Anna

Abstract

Urban green infrastructure (GI) plays a critical role in addressing global sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and public health decline. In the Nordic context, local governments own public space, making them key actors for managing public GI. This dissertation explores how Nordic local governments manage GI across organizational levels in the context of cross-sectoral demands and long-term perspectives. Cross-sectoral demands are seen through the lens of GI as a resource to promote human health and well-being (HH&W). The link between polices and implementation are studied through qualitative methods; document studies, interviews and workshops. The findings show policy addressing the relation between GI and HH&W to be general and undifferentiated, both in how it is described and in related goals and visions. On tactical level, HH&W is considered one of many arguments for the importance of GI. While horizontal collaboration between sectors is ongoing between GI and public health departments, limited resources for collaboration and mismatched priorities between levels undermine long-term outcomes. At the operational level, intra-organizational misalignments leaves maintenance practices focusing on static technical management. This hampers both long term perspectives and a more dynamic view of GI, limiting the strategic response to urban challenges. This thesis concludes that the current linear approaches of managing GI in public organizations do not sufficiently address the inherent adaptive complexity of GI. For GI to contribute to HH&W in a long term perspective, there is a need to understand alignment of visions, planning, design and implementation as an adaptive and ongoing process, operating at several organizational levels, across and within several sectors. This means that to fully harness the potential of GI in addressing current global challenges, a strategic approach to operational practice is required.

Keywords

Green infrastructure; Management; Planning; Maintenance; Public health; Nordic municipalities; Strategic management; Cross-sectoral collaboration; Sustainability

Published in

Acta Universitatis Agriculturae Sueciae
2025, number: 2025:9
Publisher: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

SLU Authors

UKÄ Subject classification

Landscape Architecture

Publication identifier

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.54612/a.5em1km8af8
  • ISBN: 978-91-8046-444-4
  • eISBN: 978-91-8046-494-9

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/132949