# Locally‐led maladaptation as a configuration of responsibilities: ethnographic photo essay of a bamboo wall in Bangladesh

## TL;DR

A study in Bangladesh shows how community-led bamboo walls, meant to adapt to climate risks, can sometimes worsen those risks due to misaligned responsibilities.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a new framework of responsibilities to understand locally-led maladaptation through ethnographic analysis.

## Key findings

- Bamboo walls in Bangladesh can unintentionally sustain climate risks due to fragmented institutional knowledge.
- Self-responsibility in at-risk communities is often coercive without proactive support from other actors.
- Locally-led adaptation needs collective accountability to avoid maladaptation.

## Abstract

The construction of bandals (bamboo walls) is a widely practised climate adaptation initiative in Bangladesh, embodying community agency. This article interrogates how it can also represent locally‐led maladaptation—adaptive efforts that inadvertently sustain or exacerbate the very risks they seek to address. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a riparian community, this photo essay examines our initial misinterpretation of a bandal project as successful locally‐led adaptation, and our subsequent reinterpretation of it as a configuration of three interrelated forms of responsibility: ‘self‐responsibility’, wherein at‐risk communities act under constraint; ‘passive responsibility’, manifested through fragmented expert and institutional knowledge; and ‘reactive responsibility’, embedded in public resource distribution patterns reflecting a logic of impact‐triggered humanitarian aid that constrains adaptive potential. We argue that, in the absence of active and proactive responsibilities assumed by a range of local actors, self‐responsibility is coerced, responsibilising at‐risk people and producing maladaptation. Locally‐led adaptation, therefore, ought to move beyond a solely community‐based framing towards a collectively accountable process.