Root causes of failures in sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS): an exploratory study in 11 municipalities in the Netherlands

Despite being widely implemented, sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) do not always function flawlessly. While SUDS have been tested extensively and seem to perform well on a laboratory or pilot scale, practitioners’ experience is different: failures in SUDS occur regularly in practice, resulting in malfunctioning systems, water nuisance and high costs. To anticipate their malfunctioning, and thus to improve their performance, a better understanding of failures occurring in SUDS and their underlying causes is needed. Based on an explorative case-study approach, consisting of site visits and semi-structured interviews with urban water professionals, this study presents an inventory of technical failures in SUDS and an analysis of their root causes. In total, 70 cases in 11 Dutch municipalities have been documented. The results show that the interfaces between SUDS and other urban systems are prominent failure locations. In addition, we found that failures originate from the entire development process of SUDS, i.e., from the design, construction and user/maintenance phase. With respect to the causes underlying these failures, our results show that these are mainly socio-institutional in nature. These are valuable insights for both practitioners and scholars, contributing to a renewed socio-technical urban water system with more sustainable water management practices.