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.

In this publication, we share our experiences with combining transdisciplinary research with the Negotiated Approached to address the challenges in groundwater management in peri-urban villages near Khulna, Bangladesh and near Kolkata, India. From 2014 – 2019, our team of researchers and civil society organizations has been executing the Shifting Grounds project. The project was developed as a transdisciplinary research project under the Urbanising Deltas of the World programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The Negotiated Approach, an approach for community empowerment, was used to combine research with capacity development within peri-urban communities. In this report, we capture our experiences as an interdisciplinary and international team, covering successes as well as challenges we faced in the process.

Transdisciplinary science transcends disciplinary boundaries. The reasons to engage in transdisciplinary science are many and include the desire to nurture a more direct relationship between science and society, as well as the desire to explain phenomena that cannot be explained by any of the existing disciplinary bodies of knowledge in isolation. Both reasons also reinforce each other, as reality often features a level of complexity that demands and inspires the combination of scientific knowledge from various disciplines. The challenge in transdisciplinary science, however, is not so much to cross disciplinary boundaries, but to ensure an effective connection between disciplines. This contribution reports on the strategy used in a transdisciplinary research project to address groundwater management in peri-urban areas in the Ganges delta. Groundwater management in peri-urban areas in rapidly urbanizing deltas is affected by diverse forces such as rapid population growth, increased economic activity and changing livelihood patterns, and other forces which result in a growing pressure on available groundwater resources. Understanding the intervention possibilities for a more sustainable groundwater management in these peri-urban areas requires an understanding of the dynamic interplay between various sub-systems, such as the physical groundwater system, the water using activities in households and livelihoods, and the institutional system of formal and informal rules that are used by various parties to access groundwater resources and to distribute the associated societal and economic costs and benefits. The ambition in the reported project is to contribute both new scientific knowledge, as well as build capacity with peri-urban stakeholders to improve the sustainability and equitability of local groundwater management. This is done by combining science and development activities, led by different organizations. The scientific component further consists of three sub-components. The connection between these scientific disciplines is made by using a multi-polar strategy. Each research works with a different framework rooted in its own scientific discipline, featuring its own concepts and theories: a hydrogeological framework, a sustainable livelihoods framework and an institutional development framework. Rather than forcing these frameworks into a new framework that is perhaps only fit for the purpose of this single research, the disciplinary frameworks are left in-tact, but are connected by a translation of key variables from one framework to the other. Often, what is an exogenous variable in one framework, is endogenous in another, and vice versa. Investigating the connections between these different poles would require an integrating perspective, for which again different scientific integration perspectives will be explored, rooted in different scientific traditions. The poster will present this framework and the initial findings and experiences with this transdisciplinary research strategy.