To succeed, climate adaptation must be embedded in a wider analysis of political economy.
Today’s world faces overlapping crises of ecology, inequality, and democracy. Few countries illustrate this convergence as clearly as Bangladesh, a land of fertile deltas and fragile futures. Every year, millions of Bangladeshis face the slow violence of rising seas, saline fields, and displaced livelihoods. Yet the roots of their suffering lie not simply in a changing climate, but in historical and structural injustices that determine who adapts, who migrates, and who survives.
Today’s world faces overlapping crises of ecology, inequality, and democracy. Few countries illustrate this convergence as clearly as Bangladesh, a land of fertile deltas and fragile futures. Every year, millions of Bangladeshis face the slow violence of rising seas, saline fields, and displaced livelihoods. Yet the roots of their suffering lie not simply in a changing climate, but in historical and structural injustices that determine who adapts, who migrates, and who survives.
At the heart of these injustices lies a gendered imbalance of power. Women, rural workers, ethnic minorities, landless peasants, the indigenous, and other marginalized communities bear the heaviest costs of climate change, while having the least say in how responses are shaped. Their struggles reveal that climate change is not merely an environmental issue, but a question of social and political justice.
Despite the country’s celebrated adaptation policies and community resilience, the reality in Bangladesh exposes how gender justice and climate justice remain deeply intertwined with the same systemic roots: patriarchy, class hierarchy, and extractive development models. To bridge this gap, we must move beyond technocratic adaptation frameworks and adopt a justice-oriented approach, informed by the transitional justice practice of acknowledging structural harm, embedded in a political and economic analysis of the unequal power relations shaping both vulnerability and response.
On the Frontlines of Risk and Resilience
Bangladesh contributes less than 0.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet ranks among the most climate-vulnerable nations on Earth. From the drought-prone plains of Rajshahi to the saline lands of Satkhira and the cyclone-ravaged coast of Cox‘s Bazar, climate change manifests in diverse but connected ways: crop failures, freshwater scarcity, forced migration, and rising social tensions.
In global climate discourse, Bangladesh is often cited as a model of adaptation: its early warning systems, community shelters, and micro-credit schemes have all been hailed as local success stories. Indeed, over the past two decades, the country has built an impressive architecture of climate policy, including the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan, the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100, the Climate Change Gender Action Plan, the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan, and, more recently, the National Adaptation Plan 2023–2050. These frameworks commit to integrating gender perspectives into adaptation and resilience-building.
The struggles for gender equality and climate justice are often treated as parallel agendas. In reality, they are deeply intertwined.
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But the reality on the ground is a bit more complicated. The structural causes of gender inequality, limited land rights, unpaid care burdens, lack of political representation, and rising religious conservatism remain deeply entrenched. Climate change does not create but rather magnifies these inequalities, which then come to constitute the fault lines along which some of the worst impacts of climate disasters are felt.
Climate Disaster Meets Patriarchy
In Bangladesh‘s drought-afflicted northwest, women farmers face dual exclusion. They are rarely landowners, which bars them from irrigation schemes or agricultural loans. When groundwater projects like the Barind Multipurpose Development Authority expand irrigation networks that benefit flow to male landowners, women labourers continue to face declining access to water and rising workloads.
In the saline and waterlogged lands of Satkhira, women walk miles each day to fetch potable water as traditional ponds turn brackish. When the men migrate seasonally for work, women manage households, livestock, and children — performing labour that is unpaid, unseen, insecure and unacknowledged.
Along the cyclone-prone coast of Cox‘s Bazar, women‘s vulnerability is amplified by cultural and religious restrictions on mobility. When disasters strike, many cannot seek shelter quickly or access relief spaces dominated by men. The influx of displaced Rohingya populations has intensified resource competition and conservative backlash, further undermining women‘s opportunities for leadership.
Across these regions, women are not merely victims — they are also frontline innovators. They manage homestead gardens, preserve seeds, rebuild homes, and sustain community networks. Yet their knowledge and agency rarely inform official adaptation planning.
This is not an accidental omission. It is the outcome of systemic gender bias embedded in the political economy of adaptation, a system that privileges technological and market-based solutions over structural change. In this context, women‘s unpaid labour becomes a kind of invisible subsidy for climate adaptation.
Gender Justice Is Climate Justice
The struggles for gender equality and climate justice are often treated as parallel agendas. In reality, they are deeply intertwined. Gender justice is not simply about inclusion or representation, it is about transforming the social relations that reproduce inequality. Similarly, climate justice goes beyond emission reductions to question who bears the costs and who controls the means of adaptation. Seen together, they reveal a shared structure of injustice rooted in the global economy: the same forces that extract natural resources also exploit gendered labour. Both depend on the invisibilization and marginalisation of care, community, and ecology.
In Bangladesh, this connection is visible in how climate impacts deepen patriarchal control. During displacement after cyclones, women‘s mobility is restricted, access to relief is mediated by male gatekeepers, and incidents of gender-based violence spike. Meanwhile, migration, often the last resort, creates new forms of vulnerability. Women left behind in rural households must shoulder both productive and reproductive labour, often without recognition or support.
Thus, the climate crisis amplifies existing inequalities while producing new ones. Addressing it requires not only better adaptation but structural transformation of gendered power relations, from the household to the state.
The Limits of Policy and the Need for Transitional Justice
Bangladesh‘s climate policy architecture appears progressive on paper. The Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan the National Adaptation Plan, and the recently updated Climate Change Gender Action Plan all mention gender equality. In practice, however, these commitments are undermined by a top-down technocratic approach. Climate funds are often channelled through government agencies with limited local accountability. Civil society organizations, especially women-led groups, struggle to access or influence these funds. The result is a form of adaptation bureaucracy that reproduces existing hierarchies instead of challenging them.
Moreover, as Bangladesh undergoes a rapid economic transition driven by garment exports, remittances, and infrastructure megaprojects, the logic of development itself remains extractive. Wetlands are claimed, forests cleared, and small farmers displaced in the name of growth. This model leaves little room for ecological balance or social justice. The political economy of adaptation, therefore, must be seen as part of a broader neoliberal project that commodifies both nature and labour.
To move beyond this impasse, Bangladesh and other climate-vulnerable societies can draw on the concept of transitional justice, a framework traditionally used to address historical injustices during political transitions such as post-conflict or post-authoritarian contexts. Its core principle is the recognition of harm and the right of affected communities to truth, reparation, institutional reform, and guarantees of non-repetition.
Without transitional justice measures such as truth-seeking, participatory policy review, and gender-responsive reform, adaptation risks reproducing the very inequalities it seeks to address.
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Applied to the climate crisis, a transitional justice approach asks:
- Who has been harmed by historical patterns of extraction, exclusion, and ecological destruction?
- How can climate-induced displacement, livelihood loss, and gender-based violence be recognized as forms of social harm rooted in structural inequalities?
- Whose voices and experiences must be documented and amplified as legitimate testimonies of injustice, particularly those of women and marginalized groups?
- What does restoration mean when compensation alone cannot undo systemic harm? How can justice be pursued through the transformation or reconstruction of the institutions and relations that produced it?
- Which institutions, from local government to disaster management, must change to ensure representation, participation, and accountability in climate governance?
- How can mechanisms for redress move beyond short-term relief towards long-term structural reform and collective repair?
For Bangladesh, this means acknowledging the colonial legacy of resource extraction, the Green Revolution‘s market logic, and the post-liberalization development model that have together shaped today‘s ecological and gendered vulnerabilities. Transitional justice provides a moral and political vocabulary to connect these histories and demand accountability from both global actors and domestic elites.
At the same time, a justice lens is particularly urgent in the current political transition, marked as it is by fragile institutions and resurgent conservatism. As governance systems weaken, women‘s access to safety, welfare, mobility, and public life shrinks. Without transitional justice measures such as truth-seeking, participatory policy review, and gender-responsive reform, adaptation risks reproducing the very inequalities it seeks to address.
Building a Feminist Political Economy of Climate Justice
Integrating transitional justice into a political economy framework helps illuminate the systemic roots of inequality. It allows us to see climate injustice not as a series of discrete policy failures but as a pattern embedded in the structure of production and governance.
A feminist political economy lens asks fundamental questions:
- How are women‘s bodies and labour exploited in the production of wealth?
- Who controls the means of adaptation, land, technology, and finance?
- How can redistribution and recognition be achieved simultaneously?
By connecting production, social reproduction, and justice system, this framework reveals how class, gender, and ecology intertwine. For instance, in many coastal communities, men migrate seasonally for wage work while women manage increasingly degraded farmlands. Climate adaptation programmes that provide microcredit to women without addressing land rights or social protection end up reinforcing debt and dependency.
A feminist political economy would instead focus on both individual and collective rights, redistributive justice, and community control of resources. Such an approach would redefine “resilience” not as the ability to survive shocks but as the capacity to transform unjust systems.
Bangladesh’s experience shows that the climate crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of inequality, and that both are sustained by systems of extraction that devalue nature and women’s labour alike.
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Despite formidable barriers, grassroots women’s groups in Bangladesh are pioneering alternative models of justice-based adaptation. In Cox’s Bazar, the NGO Mukti supports women in cultivating salt-tolerant crops and managing local disaster funds collectively. The Society for Environment and Human Development documents women’s ecological knowledge among indigenous and forest-dependent communities, linking local adaptation with rights advocacy. In Satkhira, informal women’s networks organize to demand safe drinking water and challenge elite capture of public resources. In Rajshahi, young women from Dalit and Adivasi communities experiment with drought-resilient crops and local seed banks, blending traditional practices with new techniques.
These initiatives embody the principle of climate justice from below, linking ecological sustainability with social empowerment. They also challenge the assumption that local and particularly marginalized communities are passive victims of global warming. Instead, they are agents of systemic change, often working in conditions of political neglect. At the same time, international donors and think-tanks must recognize the political nature of adaptation. Supporting women’s empowerment cannot be confined to training workshops or gender mainstreaming checklists. It requires creating political space for dissent, negotiation, and collective decision-making. The international climate regime, including the Loss and Damage Fund established under COP27, should therefore incorporate principles of participatory justice, ensuring that funds reach those who bear the heaviest burdens yet exercise the least power.
Towards a New Politics of Justice
As Bangladesh moves to implement its National Adaptation Plan, the stakes could not be higher. Without confronting the entrenched social and economic hierarchies that shape vulnerability, climate adaptation risks becoming another form of exclusion, where the poor adapt for the rich, and women adapt for men.
As the climate crisis deepens, the question is no longer whether adaptation is possible, but whose justice will define it. Across Bangladesh, women are already answering this through everyday acts of courage and creativity, cultivating crops on flooded lands, forming cooperatives to rebuild livelihoods, challenging patriarchal norms, and holding state institutions to account. Their actions reveal that at its core, adaptation is a struggle for recognition, redistribution, and rights.
Bangladesh’s experience offers vital lessons for global climate governance. It shows that the climate crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of inequality, and that both are sustained by systems of extraction that devalue nature and women’s labour alike. Addressing them demands more than financial transfers or technological fixes. It requires a new politics of justice grounded in solidarity, driven by feminist and ecological values, and oriented towards transforming the structures that produce vulnerability in the first place.
In this vision, climate adaptation becomes more than a policy goal — it becomes a democratic project of repair and renewal, linking the struggles for gender equality, environmental stewardship, and global justice into a shared horizon of transformation.
The authors would like to acknowledge Suraiya Begum and Syed Navid Anjum Hasan for contributing empirical evidence to this article..
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Meghna Guhathakurta is an independent researcher associated with Research Initiatives Bangladesh and formerly a professor at the University of Dhaka.
Vinod Koshti is a project manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s South Asia Office.
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