Assessing Public Participation Performance in China’s Sponge City and LID Projects: An Application of a Multi-Dimensional Evaluation Framework

Urbanization and climate change are increasing pluvial flooding risks, thereby intensifying the need for more adaptive stormwater governance in Chinese Sponge City projects. Although public participation is widely recognized as important, current research frequently conceptualizes it as a simplified or static attribute and seldom provides explicit criteria for identifying representative projects in large urban portfolios. This study develops a life cycle-sensitive framework for evaluating public participation in Sponge City projects by conducting a cross-city comparison in China. The study integrates project inventory construction, evidence-based representative project selection, and a multidimensional participation measurement tool covering breadth, depth, identity, and potential across planning, design, construction, and maintenance using five national pilot cities: Jinan, Shanghai, Xiamen, Shenzhen, and Wuhan. The results show that the five representative projects display distinct life cycle participation profiles, rather than a single participation pattern, influenced by project type and governance arrangement. Maintenance emerges as the strongest documented stage, whereas design is the weakest, suggesting stronger documented governance continuity after project delivery than in front-end co-design. Recurrent weaknesses remain in substantive inclusion and feedback-adoption closure. Overall, the study frames participation as a structured governance capability, providing an auditable comparative framework for identifying participation strengths and weaknesses in Sponge City governance.