What Does Autonomous Adaptation to Climate Change Have to Teach Public Policy and Planning About Avoiding the Risks of Maladaptation in Bangladesh?

Abstract

Climate vulnerability represents a highly complex public policy challenge for government due to its interaction with diverse social, political, economic, and ecological factors across scale. The policy challenge is further exacerbated when rural livelihood opportunities depend on multiple land use practices within shared social-ecological systems and adaptation actions related to one practice affects the others. In such cases, it becomes likely that national and regional-level adaptation plans will result in maladaptive trajectories if local context and properties are not carefully considered. This review highlights the importance of this issue to public policy using the case of climate change adaptation planning in Bangladesh to highlight how national and regional-level planned adaptation processes could benefit from paying closer attention to the autonomous adaptation processes occurring at local levels. Focussing on the northeastern floodplain region, an area dominated by wetland ecosystems, high climate vulnerability, and diverse and complex land use practices, we examine some of the community-level adaptation actions that are being undertaken in response to climate change and contrast these with national-level adaptation planning strategies and actions. We then analyze how the planned adaptation actions taken by government may actually end up being maladaptive, either by shifting or rebounding vulnerability. We conclude that government adaptation planning would benefit from a greater focus on learning and scrutinizing the autonomous adaptation of communities to climate stress before making significant resource allocation decisions.

Rural Livelihoods and Climate Change Adaptation in Laggard Transitional Economies: A Case from Bosnia and Herzegovina

“…Given the limited access to assets and substantial institutional constraints, as established earlier, our results indicate that adaptation responses to climate change in BH have been mainly autonomous and reactive, based on perceptions on a local or household level. These mainly local innovation-based adaptation actions have an important role in the increase of community adaptive capacity but are constrained by local access to assets [74]. There is a difference in being able to assess the probability of a threat (risk appraisal) and being able to take effective adaptive actions or responses using the resources one possesses in order to protect oneself or others from being harmed by the threat (adaptation appraisal) [35].…”

Climate change adaptation in aquaculture

“…Third, we identified four management approaches: (i) adaptation planning (Preston et al 2011; Pearce et al 2012), (ii) community‐based management/adaptation (Ford et al 2018; Piggott‐McKellar et al 2019), (iii) adaptive management (Beymer‐Farris et al 2012; Fidelman et al 2017) and (iv) government support (co‐management‐like arrangements; Armitage et al 2007; Plummer et al 2012; d’Armengol et al 2018). These management approaches could create or support local‐level coping mechanisms and multilevel adaptive strategies that are widely documented in several other sectors and the climate change adaptation literature in general (d’Armengol et al 2018; IPCC et al 2018; Rahman & Hickey 2019). Adaptation planning is about addressing broader climate adaptation concerns that are initiated at the government level (e.g.…”

“…Adaptation planning is about addressing broader climate adaptation concerns that are initiated at the government level (e.g. National Adaptation Plans; Rahman & Hickey 2019) and mostly overlaps with the policy development that leads to adaptive strategies and actions (e.g. the Solomon Islands, Taiwan).…”

The Three Dialectics of Adaptation Finance in Vietnam

“…Thus, for example, the farming innovations initiated and carried out by peasants that we mentioned above are often framed, facilitated, or disseminated by the "peasants' association" or the "women's association", which are "mass organizations", originating from the communist party, embedded in an administrative structure linking the base to the top, but locally managed by the inhabitants. Another frequent case of entanglement of local and external resources concerns the adaptive practices consisting in diversifying rural livelihoods and income, which is one of the main endogenous adaptation strategy in Vietnam: "the effectiveness of livelihood diversification as an autonomous adaptation approach will depend on the external supports offered by broader market mechanisms (e.g., labor or produce markets) or from the national government's policy and planning support mechanisms" (Rahman and Hickey 2019) [71].…”

“…The methodological challenge is to measure the respective degree of internal and external resources for each adaptation case in order to define the nature of the adaptation (more or less endogenous or exogenous). Moreover, while it is not relevant to oppose exogenous and endogenous adaptation, it is still essential to focus on the local initiatives and to document the various resources, inputs, and assets mobilized by the populations, because according to Rahman and Hickey [71] "learning from and promoting these 'grassroots' innovations has the potential to avoid government policy-driven maladaptation." We argue that, at the local level in Vietnam, interpersonal interactions, arrangements, and exchanges framed by both the logic of debt and of mutual help and regulated by strong moral and social obligation [10,45] are crucial channels for the circulation of resources dedicated to climate change adaptation.…”