To deal with large uncertainties about future climate and socio-economic developments, planners in deltas are adopting an integrative and adaptive planning approach referred to as Adaptive Delta Management (ADM). Bangladesh has used the ADM approach for the development of its adaptive plan; Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 (BDP 2100). The success of policy strategies in an adaptive delta plan critically depends on a specific adaptation of livelihoods of local communities (Community Livelihood Adaptation; CLA), especially in an agriculture-oriented society like Bangladesh. For example, while triple rice cropping might be evaluated as a robust strategy in all futures considered, its success eventually depends on whether farmers’ will actually make that choice, which is deeply uncertain. In this paper, we use literature review, insights from interviews and field observations to examine how the uncertainty in CLA impacts (adaptive) delta management. We study two historical cases of livelihood adaptation of farmer communities confronted with salinization and waterlogging in the polders of southwest Bangladesh since the 1960s. We conclude that historically the uncertainty about CLA in polders has been ignored in the development of policy plans, leading to the failure of anticipated policy outcomes. We recommend planners in Bangladesh and other deltas worldwide to take account of CLA as uncertainty when developing long-term adaptive plans.

Delta communities worldwide are facing a multitude of challenges in their life and livelihood. In many developing countries, improving the quality of life and livelihood is a key challenge. While development is a central goal of delta planning in such countries, the effectiveness of planning is challenged by uncertain changes in climate and socio-economy. Bangladesh (one of the countries) is moving towards the adaptive delta management approach to deal with such uncertainties. Historical examples illustrate that Community Livelihood Adaptation (CLA) can critically influence the effectiveness of a policy strategy. Therefore, there is a clear need to explore CLA under uncertainty. For that purpose, this paper develops and applies a conceptual model-based approach combining the mental model and scenarios techniques. Our approach starts by using a participatory process to elicit mental models a farmers’ community uses when considering adaptation decisions; we capture these in the form of a cognitive map, and this map can serve as a conceptual model for analyzing livelihood adaptation decision-making in a future-oriented scenario analysis. To illustrate the approach, a case study of cropping decision-making of farmers community at a polder location under the saline condition in the southwest of Bangladesh has been elaborated. Results show that the approach is useful in structuring the cognitive and qualitative nature of complex decision-making process, and helps in understanding the dynamic interactions of farmers’ adaptation decisions with other actors, their environmental attributes, and market traits. It can help policymakers anticipate the adaptation direction of policy strategies.

Community operational research (COR) helps local stakeholders address complex messy problems related to public goods. Many of these problems feature an institutional dimension, whereby institutions refer to rules that structure behaviour and interactions in society. If a sound analysis of this institutional dimension is limited in scope, or even completely absent, then the result is an incomplete problem understanding or a narrower solution space. In this paper, we outline a COR approach for participatory institutional analysis of local problems aimed at enhancing problem formulation and solution-finding efforts. The process has four main steps: problem identification, institutional system mapping, strategic analysis, and strategy exploration. This approach is applied to the issue of water supply in a marginalized, peri urban village near Khulna city, Bangladesh. Our paper discusses the results achieved thus far, and we argue that our analytical framework and methods prove to be promising for this peri urban application. However, their use with local stakeholders requires an intensive process of two-way capacity building between communities and analysts, developing a joint understanding of both local problems and key components/mechanisms in institutional development.

Several model-based, analytical approaches have been developed recently to deal with the deep uncertainty present in situations for which futures studies are conducted. These approaches focus on covering a wide variety of scenarios and searching for robust strategies. However, they generally do not take the multiplicity of stakeholder perspectives into account in analytic terms, which could bring in diverse opinions and views, not only on possible futures but also on values and interests. In this study, we present an approach to incorporate stakeholder perspectives into model-based scenarios for exploring the future dynamics of the Dutch gas sector. The results demonstrate that the scenario space can be demarcated according to the perspectives. This allows for a systematic comparison of the perspectives and provides a basis for identification of robust strategies. Also, the analysis shows that incompatible elements between the model and perspectives, or within perspectives can be identified. This provides insights about the problem complexity and potential barriers to the futures envisioned by the perspectives. Future research can strengthen this approach by involving stakeholders in modelling and in the model-based representation of the perspective narratives to enhance learning and credibility, and can extend the analysis to identify (socially) robust policies.

Flexibility is often proposed as a valuable capability to cope with uncertainty and change. However, there is no consensus about what constitutes flexibility across the literature. A review of publications on flood management, real options and manufacturing reveals remarkable commonalities along with substantial inconsistencies in the use of flexibility. These observations are used for structuring the discussion of flexibility in this paper. A framework is proposed in the form of four self-consistent and step-wise questions: (Q1) why is flexibility needed; (Q2) what is it that flexibility is required for; (Q3) what are the dimensions of flexibility; (Q4) what needs to change or be adapted? In order to answer the questions in the context of multifunctional flood defences (MFFDs), eight characteristic features of flexibility in connection with the four questions are distilled from the synthesized publications. Subsequently, a working definition of flexibility is developed. An illustrative case study examines the framework’s potential for the development of a MFFD. It is shown that the iterative use of the framework can serve as a guideline for identifying and evaluating flexibility for MFFDs. The paper ends with some challenges for future research.