A Comparative Study on the Decision Making Process of Coastal Climate Adaptation of Bangladesh

Bangladesh has a coastline of 710 km along the Bay of Bengal, which will be extremely exposed to climatic hazards over the coming decades. At present, the improvement of people’s livelihoods of this zone largely depends on the climate adaptation approaches adopted mainly through water management and agricultural practice. Although the cross-sectoral dimension of the Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) plan encourages stakeholder engagement during the development phase, subsequent implementation tends to be top-down in nature, which creates critical gaps between national and local level governance. Consequently, the outputs (policy, strategies, programs etc.) of ICZM, and recent coastal adaptation action plans, are ineffective in implementing, monitoring and evaluating the processes of achieving sustainable livelihoods in the coastal zone. Therefore the aim of this paper is to understand how different stakeholders and practitioners at different scales (national, district, local) make decisions on coastal climate adaptation. It also examines how they develop adaptation options suited to specific coastal regions, and assess people’s adaptive capacity to climate change. It reports on a comparative study of a coastal island and a coastal estuarine region in Bangladesh. Its findings demonstrate that the selection of priority components for decision making process and adaptation options in relation to 'sustainable coastal planning’ can help to overcome the institutional gaps and risks related to climate change. Considering the barriers to adoption and effective implementation of the ICZM, the case study evaluates the successes and failings of the decision making process, and its relevance for similar regions in other developing countries of the world.