Governance and society-driven challenges to community-based disaster management: A case study from Chandpur, Bangladesh

Abstract

In Bangladesh, the Chandpur Sadar Upazila is recurrently exposed to floods, riverbank erosion, cyclones and other riverine hazards. Given this vulnerability, there is a global and national trend towards community-based disaster management (CBDM). Although capacity-building measures may help address challenges, there is very little research on which measures are actually underway at the upazila level or on the obstacles administrators and residents face in their implementation. This CBDM capacity-building
research looks back at the initiatives undertaken in Chandpur Sadar Upazila over the preceding five years (i.e., approximately 2018–2023) and identifies the governance- and society-driven constraints associated with them. The study used a mixed-methods stakeholder-informed design, having a secondary review (of policy documents and literature) and primary data (gathered through two semi-structured interview instruments). Due to accessibility constraints, the researcher approached government officials, elected community leaders, and representatives of NGOs using convenience sampling, while for the youth volunteers, snowball sampling was used, as there was no registry of trainees. Data were collected through interviews with 62 respondents, and analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics and thematic coding. The analysis identified six types of community-based initiatives in the study area: social safety net assistance, volunteer team formation, disaster drills, awareness campaigns, training programmes, and NGO participation incentives. These challenges have been grouped into two major sources, yielding thirteen distinct challenges in total. The challenges of governance and policy deal with an intermittent rather than sustained focus on CBDM, inappropriate decentralization without capacity, spatial concentration of initiatives away from the most exposed char areas, goal displacement from CBDM toward poverty reduction, absence of training to elected and administrative officials, missing records of trainees, low budget allocation, absence of safety equipment, absence of localised disaster-management plans at Union level, and formalised stakeholder communication with limited trust and continuity. Socially, the community prefers established relief over training; social stereotypes prevent women's contributions, and there is limited socialisation of CBDM within the wider community. The results indicate that the simultaneous improvement of institutional capacity, the budget, and social change at the community level is essential for developing sustainable community resilience in a disaster-prone deltaic area such as Chandpur.