Capital, rules or conflict? Factors affecting livelihood-strategies, infrastructure-resilience, and livelihood-vulnerability in the polders of Bangladesh

Coastal regions are most susceptible to the effects of climate change. To increase infrastructure-resilience of such regions, reduce livelihood-vulnerability of people living in such regions and equip them with appropriate livelihood strategies, governments have invested heavily in coastal infrastructure such as polders. This research is focused on the polders of Bangladesh. The effectiveness of Bangladesh’s polders is disputed. No large-scale, evaluative, quantitative analysis of polders has yet been conducted. There is also only a limited number of evaluative studies on the factors which affect livelihood strategies, livelihood-vulnerability or infrastructure-resilience in polders. Therefore, the research question guiding this research is: What factors affect livelihood strategies, infrastructure-resilience, and livelihood-vulnerability in the polders of Bangladesh? These questions are answered by drawing on propositions from the Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA) using statistical analysis of a dataset of 137 polders. This dataset has been created from 76 survey-based interviews, secondary research and geo-spatial analysis. It is hypothesized that under different contextual settings, different combinations of livelihood resource endowments, lead to different combinations of livelihood strategies. These combinations of livelihood strategies lead to different outcomes after being moderated by different institutional, and political settings, under different contextual settings. This research demonstrates that various kinds of conflict-related and rule-making variables affect sustainability outcomes. Relationships proposed by the SLA are statistically significant and are generalizable across a large number of heterogeneous sites. Geological, geomorphological, climatic and hydrological conditions also affect livelihood decisions of polder-residents and also affect the condition of polder-infrastructure.