The politics of linking disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation with social protection in Bangladesh

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on the mainstreaming and integration of climate change strategies to make social protection systems more adaptive and effective for tackling mounting climate-induced vulnerability. However, little is known about the extent to which climate change concerns are being incorporated into social protection systems and what drives such mainstreaming and integration. Employing a building blocks framework for mainstreaming and political settlement theory, we assess the progress made in such efforts in Bangladesh, and provide a political economy analysis of relevant policies, strategies, and qualitative empirical data. While the findings suggest that there is no distinct alignment between the growth of social protection and particular forms of political settlements, we demonstrate that the dominant ruling party shows strong political will for the mainstreaming of climate strategies into development policies; yet it does so by managing subsistence crises, adopting a top-down and techno-managerial approach to social protection to give short-term relief from climate vulnerabilities at the expense of making the schemes adaptive. Instead of improving performance by implementing programmes strictly and disciplining local actors, the dominant ruling party maintains a clientelist structure that placates elite interests, showcasing performance of developmental interventions through corrupt reporting practices. Consequently, we argue that the mainstreaming and integration process should adopt a rights-based transformative approach to social protection and employ a locally led process of adaptation decision-making in order to strengthen political capabilities of citizens and to create more just, equitable and sustainable outcomes for the poor.