Stakeholder perspectives on governance barriers and public–private partnership pathways in green infrastructure implementation in South Africa

Cities face mounting pressures from rapid urbanisation, climate change, and persistent service delivery deficits. Green urban infrastructure (GI), encompassing nature-based solutions, biodiversity-integrated networks, and hybrid ecological systems, has emerged as a response to these intersecting crises. Yet in the Global South, and South Africa specifically, its translation into practice remains uneven, constrained by institutional inertia, fragmented governance, and structural financing gaps. This study investigates how stakeholders across government, the private sector, academia, and civil society perceive and navigate GI development in South Africa across three dimensions: (1) the integration of sustainability into infrastructure planning and execution; (2) the key challenges and opportunities shaping GI implementation; and (3) the extent to which public–private partnerships (PPPs) support GI initiatives. Adopting a qualitative, interpretivist design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 purposively sampled professionals and analysed thematically. Findings indicate that while sustainability has gained rhetorical prominence, implementation remains uneven, with sustainability functioning more as a discursive imperative than an embedded planning logic. Four interrelated barriers dominate: grey-infrastructure professional culture, policy–implementation dissonance, procurement misfit, and fragmented governance. Opportunities centre on climate finance mobilisation, co-benefit framing, ESG-driven private investment, and institutional integration. The study provides practitioner-grounded evidence on GI–PPP delivery in South Africa and advances scholarship on green infrastructure governance, financing, and sustainability transitions.