ABSTRACT
This chapter, ‘Situating migration in planned and autonomous adaptation practices to climate change in Bangladesh’, highlights policy discourse of Bangladesh viewing migration as a negative outcome of climate change. Such understanding led almost all the actors, that is, the Government of Bangladesh, its international development partners and also the non-governmental organisations, to concentrate on infrastructure interventions and local-level livelihood adaptation programmes to reduce the need for migration. This paper demonstrates that contrary to planned adaptation programmes, the autonomous adaptation practices of affected households have integrated different forms migration as one of the many adaptation strategies. This paper uses both primary and secondary data from three regions, all hotspots of environmental and hazards of climate change. Chapai Nawabganj suffers from drought, Satkhira experiences cyclones and saline intrusion and Munshiganj faces floods and riverbank erosion, which are also both common in the previous two areas. It establishes that adaptation outcome of migration is context specific and under some social, economic, demographic and policy environment, migration leads to adaptation while in some other situation it leads to maladaptation.
