Presentation short abstract

Water crisis is exacerbating under climate crisis. Hydraulic intervention further complicates water governance. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals a complex socio-political context that shaped water access, management and use, highlighting the need for participatory and adaptive water governance.

Presentation long abstract

Climate change is increasingly experienced as a water crisis, particularly in deltaic regions where rising seas, erratic rainfall, hydraulic interventions, and competing demand for water create a complex water regime. An apolitical, techno-bureaucratic water management approach further complicates water governance. This study examines water governance in coastal Bangladesh through a political ecology lens, challenging the dominant techno-bureaucratic paradigm that privileges infrastructures and market outcomes over socio-political realities.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and policy review, we highlight how local communities navigate seasonal water scarcity and monsoon waterlogging while confronting conflicting water demands between shrimp aquaculture and agriculture. Fieldwork reveals a complex socio-political context that shapes water access, management, and use. Community-led initiatives—including partial banning of shrimp farming, constructing small scale water infrastructure, and politicizing water access in electoral agendas—demonstrate adaptive, participatory governance that contrasts sharply with national policies focused on mega infrastructures, e.g., embankments, and centralized management, i.e., district water committees.

Our findings underscore that water governance is inherently social and political, shaped by everyday negotiation, contestation, flexible cooperation and local power dynamics. By providing empirical evidence on community-led water management strategies, this research contributes to the greater debate on adaptive water governance in an exacerbating climate crisis context, emphasizing the need to bridge the gap between policy design and practice in vulnerable coastal environments.