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

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

A framework for using autonomous adaptation as a leverage point in sustainable climate adaptation

Planned adaptations are commonly adopted by governments considering large-scale socio-economic and political interventions, while local communities innovate their adaptive responses using locally available resources â also known as autonomous adaptation. Congruence between planned and autonomous adaptation is needed to develop a concerted and effective effort to minimize the negative impacts of context-specific vulnerability. This paper offers a systematic framework for building congruence between planned and autonomous adaptation using a six-step approach to guide their integration while maintaining an environment for future autonomous innovations. We applied this framework to previously conducted case studies in Spain, Bangladesh and Canada, revealing key lessons for using autonomous adaptation as leverage points for sustainable climate adaptation. © 2021The authors would like to acknowledge funding from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Funding 201989 (Rahman PI). The authors would also like to thank Professor Kate Sherren, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada for her comments on the earlier draft of the paper

A framework for analyzing institutional gaps in natural resource governance

In this paper we present the Inter-Institutional Gap(IIG) Framework as a novel approach to conceptualizing the often-overlooked interconnectivity of different rule-levels between formal and informal institutions in a resource system. This framework goes beyond the existing concepts of legal pluralism, institutional void, structural hole, and cultural mismatch, each of which offer valuable insights to particular gaps between formal and informal institutions, but do not sufficiently address the interaction at every rule level (i.e. constitutional choice, collective choice and operational choice rules). In order to demonstrate the potential of our framework for better understanding the underlying causes of inter-institutional gaps, we apply it to four case studies that encompass diverse geographical locations, governance scales, and social-ecological systems. Results reveal inter-institutional gaps can be created when there are unintended, unforeseen or hidden gaps between different rule hierarchies in two or more simultaneously operating institutions. More specifically we observe that: i) inter-institutional gaps are co-existing, therefore if a certain gap is identified, other gaps may be expected; ii) certain gaps may reveal latent gaps; and iii) intermediaries may be key to addressing inter-institutional gaps. In many cases, sustainable natural resource management and regulation cannot be achieved without directly addressing the inter-institutional gaps that exist between formal and informal institutions operating in the same resource system. The Framework facilitates analysis and understanding of multi-level governance structures in pursuit of addressing complex natural resource management issues

Institutional Innovation for Nature-Based Coastal Adaptation: Lessons from Salt Marsh Restoration in Nova Scotia, Canada

Sea-levels have been rising at a faster rate than expected. Because of the maladaptive outcomes of engineering-based hard coastal protection infrastructure, policy makers are looking for alternative adaptation approaches to buffer against coastal flooding—commonly known as nature-based coastal adaptation (NbCA). However, how to implement NbCA under an institutional structure demonstrating ‘inertia’ to alternative adaptation approaches is a question that seeks scientific attention. Building on a case study derived from a highly climate-vulnerable Canadian province, this study shows how the entrepreneurial use of scientific information and institutional opportunities helped institutional actors overcome the inertia. Drawing on secondary document analysis and primary qualitative data, this study offers five key lessons to institutional actors aiming at implementing NbCA: (i) develop knowledge networks to help avoid uncertainty; (ii) identify and utilize opportunities within existing institutions; (iii) distribute roles and responsibilities among actors based on their capacity to mobilize required resources; (iv) provide entrepreneurial actors with decision-making autonomy for developing agreed-upon rules and norms; and (v) facilitate repeated interactions among institutional actors to develop a collaborative network among them. This study, therefore, helps us to understand how to implement a relatively new adaptation option by building trust-based networks among diverse and relevant institutional actors

Institutional Innovation for Nature-Based Coastal Adaptation: Lessons from Salt Marsh Restoration in Nova Scotia, Canada

Published versionSea-levels have been rising at a faster rate than expected. Because of the maladaptive outcomes of engineering-based hard coastal protection infrastructure, policy makers are looking for alternative adaptation approaches to buffer against coastal flooding—commonly known as nature-based coastal adaptation (NbCA). However, how to implement NbCA under an institutional structure demonstrating ‘inertia’ to alternative adaptation approaches is a question that seeks scientific attention. Building on a case study derived from a highly climate-vulnerable Canadian province, this study shows how the entrepreneurial use of scientific information and institutional opportunities helped institutional actors overcome the inertia. Drawing on secondary document analysis and primary qualitative data, this study offers five key lessons to institutional actors aiming at implementing NbCA: (i) develop knowledge networks to help avoid uncertainty; (ii) identify and utilize opportunities within existing institutions; (iii) distribute roles and responsibilities among actors based on their capacity to mobilize required resources; (iv) provide entrepreneurial actors with decision-making autonomy for developing agreed-upon rules and norms; and (v) facilitate repeated interactions among institutional actors to develop a collaborative network among them. This study, therefore, helps us to understand how to implement a relatively new adaptation option by building trust-based networks among diverse and relevant institutional actors

Freshwater swamp forest trees of Bangladesh face extinction risk from climate change

Global climate change is impacting the distribution and abundance of species acting as a major cause of species extinction. It is rapid in freshwater swamp forest ecosystems, since they support disproportionate levels of biodiversity compared to their spatial coverage. The natural swamp forests of Bangladesh have been especially susceptible to climate change as they are limited in range to a few scattered patches in the north-eastern region. We sought to understand how climate change may impact the swamp forests of Bangladesh by modelling distributional changes in Pongamia pinnata and Barringtonia acutangula species, which dominate or co-dominate most swamp forest ecosystems across Bangladesh. We used the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) modelling tool, combined presence-only data of species and bioclimatic variables for two climate scenarios (RCP6.0 and RCP8.5). We compared current, 2050 and 2070 distributions. Results suggest that plant extractable water holding capacity of soil, annual precipitation, precipitation of warmest quarter and mean annual actual evapotranspiration are the key bioclimatic variables for the distribution of both trees. The MaxEnt models indicate that Pongamia pinnata and Barringtonia acutangula trees of Bangladesh face increasing climate stress and may become extinction under both mid-range and extreme climate scenarios.12 page(s

Informal institutional responses to government interventions : lessons from Madhupur National Park, Bangladesh

Madhupur National Park is renowned for severe resource ownership conflicts between ethnic communities and government authorities in Bangladesh. In this study, we applied the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to identify: (i) past and present informal institutional structures within the ethnic Garo community for land resource management; (ii) the origin of the land ownership dispute; (iii) interaction mechanisms between formal and informal institutions; and (iv) change in land management authority and informal governance structures. We identify that the informal institutions of the traditional community have undergone radical change due to government interventions with implications for the regulation of land use, informal institutional functions, and joint-decision-making. Importantly, the government's persistent denial of the role of existing informal institutions is widening the gap between government and community actors, and driving land ownership conflicts in a cyclic way with associated natural resource degradation.15 page(s

Legitimacy of different knowledge types in natural resource governance and their functions in inter-institutional gaps

This study expands the Inter-Institutional Gaps (IIGs) framework to conceptualize the legitimacy associated with different types of ecological knowledge (e.g., scientific, traditional and local) used in natural resource governance. We draw on primary qualitative data, and document analysis to examine a case of inland fisheries management in the north-eastern floodplain of Bangladesh. We posit that the pragmatic, moral, cognitive, and regulative legitimacy for different types of ecological knowledge are repeatedly reevaluated by rule-makers and resource users in the process of rule-devising. Results show that inter-institutional gaps may be perpetuated when formal rules do not sufficiently consider traditional and local ecological knowledge. While it is widely proposed that systematically incorporating different knowledge types can better address local-national policy problems, this study underscores that the source of legitimacies for different knowledge types often differs across formal and informal institutional actors. Recognizing the differences is critical to fishers’ resource management