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Building community resilience to climate-induced disaster shocks requires an innovative, adaptive, and forward-looking approach. However, empirical data on such initiatives is lacking. Adopting an Adaptive Governance Framework, we gathered evidence that collaborative multi-loop social learning by multilevel institutions (local, regional, and national) can significantly enhance community resilience to climate induced disaster shocks and reduce gaps between institutional disaster governance responsibilities and capacities. Following a Case Study approach, we investigated the disaster resilience of two coastal communities in Bangladesh. Our primary data collection techniques were Key Informant Interviews and document reviews. The results of our investigation revealed three key prerequisites for building community resilience to nature-triggered disasters like cyclones or floods: i) the presence of multiple nested institutional structures at the local level; ii) multi-loop social learning at multiple institutional levels; and iii) documentation of lessons learned from each disaster and the application of these lessons to disaster governance at all institutional levels. We documented that bridging organizations play a decisive role in documenting and scaling-up lessons learned from episodic extreme weather events. Therefore, more emphasis needs to be placed on the importance of bridging organizations in scaling up lessons from episodic disaster events into national-level policy and practice.

Despite widespread recognition that social learning can potentially contribute toward enhancing community resilience to climate-induced disaster shocks, studies on this process remain few and far b...

The feedback relationships between resource-dependent human communities and their local ecosystem services may result in an undesirable SES dynamic where community wellbeing continually deteriorates. Yet, very little is known about the mechanisms that can facilitate reordering people’s relationship with ecosystem for sustained wellbeing. We argue that innovative approaches built upon local strengths are more likely to succeed in such an endeavour, and multi-level implementation can help sustainability and community wellbeing. The objective of this paper is to give an account of local people’s wellbeing in relation to ecosystem services and their changes, the drivers that change the ecosystem services and impact wellbeing, and the role of innovation in enhancing adaptability and SES resilience to changes and disturbances. We conducted our field research during 2014–2015 in a wetland region of northeastern Bangladesh, utilising Case study and participatory research methods. Our empirical investigation in selected wetland communities has revealed that: (i) community wellbeing and wetland SES resilience are subject to erosion due to multiple drivers of change operating at different temporal and spatial scales; (ii) the feedback relationships among these multiple drivers often adversely affect community wellbeing; and (iii) innovative strategies built on local strengths can help reorder people’s relationships with local ecosystems, restore community wellbeing, and enhance local sustainability. The key determinants of such reordering include entrepreneurial skills, knowledge, learning, and networking abilities of the locals. Intervention strategies should therefore pay more attention to the locals’ ability to innovate and adapt to ecological changes, especially through new or shifted livelihood initiatives.

Disaster management and resilience-building initiatives have been hypothesized as more effective when integrated with local governance structures. However, factors shaping the institutionalization ...

Purpose Coastal and floodplain areas are on the frontline of climate change in Bangladesh. Small-scale coastal and floodplain fishing communities of the country face a host of cross-scale stressors continually, some induced by climate change, and they have developed coping and adaption strategies based on customary social and experiential learnings. This paper aims to examine the coping and adaptation strategies that small-scale fishing communities undertake in the face of stresses including climate change and variability. Design/methodology/approach This research takes a nuanced ethnographic-oriented approach based on around two-year-long field study in two coastal and floodplain fishing villages, represented by two distinct ethnic groups. The study adopts direct observational methods to denote the ways small-scale fishing communities address the arrays of stressors to construct and reconstruct their survival and livelihood needs. Findings It was observed that fishers’ coping and adaptation strategies comprise a fluid combination of complex overlapping sets of actions that the households undertake based on their capitals and capabilities, perceptions, socio-cultural embeddedness and experiential learnings from earlier adverse situations. Broadly, these are survival, economic, physiological, social, institutional and religiosity-psychological in nature. Adaptation mechanisms involve some implicit principles or self-provisioning actions that households are compelled to do or choose under given sets of abnormal stresses to reach certain levels of livelihood functions. Originality/value Based on empirical field research, this paper recognizes small-scale fishers’ capability and adaptability in addressing climate change-induced stresses. Policymakers, international development planners, climate scientists and social workers can learn from these grassroots-level coping and adaptation strategies of fishing communities to minimize the adverse effects of climate change and variations.

The fundamental processes of policy shifts emphasize how policy problems emerge and how policy decisions are made to overcome previous shortcomings. In Bangladesh, flood management policies may also have been driven by policy failures and flood-disaster events. In this context, we examined how policy shifts occurred in the country from 1947 to 2019 in areas of water management and flood prevention, control, and risk mitigation. To understand the nature of these policy shifts, we examined the evolutionary processes of flood management policies, the associated drivers, and the roles of key actors. Our findings reveal that policy transitions were influenced primarily by the predominance of the structural intervention paradigm and by catastrophic flood events. Such transitions were nonlinear due to multiple interest groups who functioned as contributors to, as well as barriers against, flood prevention policies. Policy debates over environmental concerns helped bring about a shift from a primary focus on structural intervention to a mixed approach incorporating various nonstructural interventions. Furthermore, our results suggest that the shifts in flood management policies have resulted in some degree of reliance on a &ldquo, people-centered&rdquo, approach rather than solely an &ldquo, engineering coalition&rdquo, which emphasizes the pivotal role of community members in decision making and the implementation of flood policies and programs.

This paper illustrates a shifted microfinance modality that adopted greening principles towards sustainability. The empirical context of the research was a green microfinance programme implemented by an NGO microfinance institution at two study sites in Bangladesh. The research conceived and tested a microfinance model underpinned by ‘ecological modernization’ and ‘innovation and entrepreneurship’ theories. Field studies were carried out between January 2012 and June 2013 in order to match the ‘theoretical realm’ with the ‘observational realm’. A case study and participatory methods were the primary means of studying the modality and operations of the green microfinance strategy. The study compared the ecological outcomes of green microfinance-assisted enterprises and traditional microcredit-assisted enterprises and measured their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Cool Farm Tool software was used to quantify GHGs. Comparison with a designed experiment shows that micro-enterprises employing green strategies emit less GHGs than the ones with traditional strategies. The research revealed that the microfinance-based greening interventions help to ensure ecological outcomes for micro-enterprises; thus, the combination of the embedded economic and social elements of the classic microfinance model with the new ecological elements supports sustainability.

The objective of this research was to explore, both theoretically and empirically, the ecological impacts of small-scale entrepreneurial ventures in developing countries. To this end, six microenterprises in rural southwestern Bangladesh established using green-microcredit strategies were evaluated in terms of goals, operational procedures, economic viability, social contributions, and impact on local ecological sustainability. This research revealed that the majority of such enterprises are not only sustainable and comply with current ecological standards, but also contribute a considerable number of vital ecosystem services while simultaneously maintaining suitably high profit margins to promise long-term economic viability. These findings indicate that microenterprises given environmental guidance by developmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—especially NGOs microfinance institutions, NGO-MFIs—have the potential to make significant ecological contributions and address the issue of climate change from the bottom of the social ladder upwards.

Due to its deltaic geographical position and precarious socioeconomic and demographic conditions, Bangladesh is recognized worldwide for its exposure to recurring environmental hazards. Based on a 21-month long field study in two fishing villages that are characterized by distinct ecological settings and ethnic groups, this article examines the arrays of cross-scale environmental, social and institutional stressors that singly or cumulatively impact fishers’ livelihood well-being and generational poverty. Analysis of the vulnerabilities makes it clear that the degree to which poor fishers suffer from environmental stressors and calamities is determined not only by the frequency of abnormal events, but also by their internal capabilities of self-protection, resilience against those stressors, position in the social network and asset and resource ownership. Coastal and floodplain fishers identified cyclone and long-standing floods as strong drivers of poverty as their bundles of ‘safety net’ capital are usually disrupted or lost. For a majority of the fishers, income/day/family declines to as low as US$ 0.7–0.9. Fishers lack appropriate sets of endowments and entitlements that would allow them immediate buffer against livelihood stressors. Vulnerability here is intricately related to one’s socio-economic status; poor and ‘socially vulnerable’ ethnic fishers are concurrently ‘biologically vulnerable’ too. The corollary of multi-faceted stressors is that, poverty persists as an ever-increasing haunting presence that thousands of floodplain and coastal fishers of Bangladesh are forced to cope with. It is evident that nature-induced stressors exert ‘ratchet effects’ on fishers with low endowments who critically risk nutritional deprivation and social standing. Lucidly, most of the fishers are trapped in a form of ‘ livelihood war’.

The focus of this study is public participation in the water resource and associated hazards management decision-making processes. It explores the importance, feasibility, and effectiveness of public participation in the flood management, decision-making process, with particular attention to the case of the Red River Basin of Manitoba, Canada. The nature and efficacy of public participation in the hearings conducted by the International Joint Commission (IJC) in the aftermath of the 1997 Red River flood are critically reviewed. The results of the analysis suggest that the IJC has been more sensitive to the views of the public and concerned stakeholders than the Red River Basin Task Force. The IJC incorporated a substantial portion of the opinions, suggestions, and concerns expressed by the public into the final recommendations produced by the commission for the Canadian and American federal governments. Public participation was an integral component of the IJC hearings, and was expected to contribute to flood preparedness in the future. The reasons for such accommodation of public and the stakeholders’ views in decision-making are primarily attributed to making the proposed projects and programs socio-economically and politically feasible. Because of their general characteristics, the lessons from the case of the Red River Basin could be used as an effective tool in other resource and environmental hazard management areas.

The municipal waste disposal crisis has received considerable public attention in recent years, particularly as it has become increasingly difficult, both financially and politically, to dispose of the steadily growing volume of waste. With municipalities under pressure to find acceptable alternatives to the traditional forms of refuse disposal - landfilling and incineration - the recycling of household waste has been advocated by policy makers and some environmentalists as a possible solution. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors influencing the collection and disposal of household recyclables, as well as the effectiveness of institutional strategies to induce residents' participation in such a program. The study area is the city of Brandon, Manitoba, a settlement of some 40 000 people, 210 kilometres west of Winnipeg. To obtain a representative overview of the recycling behaviour of the population, three groups totalling a sample of 490 respondents, were investigated. Two of these groups were made up of people who actively recycle, and the third constituted a control group made up of those who do not engage in recycling activities. An overview of the municipal initiatives in Brandon, and an analysis of the data collected in the study, as well as statistics available on recycling programs from other sources, indicate that the recently introduced services and facilities have contributed to make significant qualitative changes but with limited success in dealing with the real magnitude of the solid waste problem. It is suggested that the goals of the various strategies have been established, but there is currently little incentive -apart from personal satisfaction - for residents to participate. This would seem to explain the limited success, in quantitative terms, of the programs to date

Since the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the country experienced four abnormally high floods. This study examines causes and impacts of the 1988 flood and evaluates the range of possible human adjustments in mitigating such hazards. Although deforestation and other human modifications of the natural environment, through implementation of flood-related engineering schemes along the upstream reaches of the rivers, may partially cause abnormal floods in the downstream zones, the physical and geographical characteristics of the region provide much of the explanation. It is argued that physical prevention of floods, through means of “technological fix,” is likely to pose serious threats to long-term sustainability of floodplain ecology and sociocultural resources of Bangladesh.