Case Report for Wilmington, Delaware, USA

Work package 1 of the Creating Interfaces project aims to evaluate the governance of the food, water, and energy systems in three mid-sized cities on the water: Wilmington, DE, USA; Tulcea, Romania; and Slupsk, Poland. The project team sought to understand the existing governance structures as well as the interactions between participants. The team also sought to learn of problems or concerns in the governance of food, water, and energy systems that could inform later project efforts. This report reflects initial information collected for the city of Wilmington, DE, USA. Information sources included publicly available documents obtained through a broad online search, and available secondary datasets. Primary data were obtained from one community workshop held on April 6, 2019 and semi-structured interviews with key informants in the region conducted up until August 2020. Human subjects research approval for the primary data collection was obtained from the University of Delaware’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) in March 2019. Workshop participants were invited through the existing networks of the University of Delaware’s Community Engagement Initiative, the Biden School of Public Policy & Administration, and the City of Wilmington Partnership. Prospective interviewees were identified in documents as well as named by other interview participants in a snowball fashion. Confidentiality of participants was assured at all times. Interviews were conducted in-person or by phone at the request of the participant, and some but not all of the interviews were audio-recorded. All researcher notes from the workshop and interviews were reviewed by the research team and coded with respect to food, water, energy systems and their governance. Additional interviews were sought to fill knowledge gaps until reaching saturation on many topics of interest to the research team. Information in this report will be used next to produce a comparative case evaluation of governance in the project’s three case cities.