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

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.