From Drivers to Responses: Local Insights and National Frameworks for Restoring Urban Lakes in Bengaluru

Urban freshwater ecosystems in rapidly growing cities face multiple, interlinked pressures. This paper synthesises 411 academic, policy, and practitioner studies on lake degradation and restoration in Bengaluru, India, to examine how these pressures are understood and addressed in research and practice. Using Content Configuration Analysis, we pursue four lines of inquiry: typifying dominant research approaches; mapping how key drivers—urbanisation, expanding consumption, climate change, and governance fragmentation—generate cascading pressures, analysing sewage treatment plants (STPs) as responses that can themselves become new stressors, and comparing national restoration guidelines with locally developed strategies. Our analysis shows that lake problems are frequently framed as discrete technical issues, whereas degradation unfolds through recursive driver-pressure-response dynamics that cut across ecological, institutional, and social domains. The STP cases illustrate this mismatch: mandated solutions can generate unintended pressures when institutional capability, accountability, or ecological integration is weak. Comparison between national guidelines and locally grounded practices reveals broad alignment in restoration principles but persistent gaps in implementation capacity, coordination, financing, and integration with land-use and urban resilience planning remains. We argue for reconceptualising urban lakes as embedded socio-ecological systems rather than bounded technical units. Such a perspective supports restoration strategies that are nationally coherent yet locally attuned, strengthening ecological function, social equity, and urban resilience. More broadly, the findings contribute to debates on the restoration and governance of urban water bodies by demonstrating how national policy frameworks can be reinforced through locally grounded socio-ecological knowledge.