Assessing Institutional Responses to Climate Change Impacts in the North-Eastern Floodplains of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh encounters diverse climate change impacts at different scales, which can severely affect rural communities and livelihoods. In response, the government of Bangladesh has initiated a number of institutional interventions through development plans to better support sustainable adaptation. There have, however, been relatively few assessments of how these interventions have impacted sustainable local adaptation. Focusing on the highly climate-affected north-eastern floodplain region of Bangladesh, this paper presents the results of a literature synthesis supported by primary field data to identify how existing policy barriers can threaten institutional responses to climate change impacts, while institutional rigidity and the non-inclusiveness of bureaucratic polity work to undermine efficiency, effectiveness, and equitability-some important considerations for sustainable adaptation. Our results point toward the need for public policy to better enable broader public participation in the design, implementation, and evaluation of adaptation plans.

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.