Governance reconfiguration under ecological stress: A thematic review of climate adaptation evidence from the Barind Tract of Bangladesh

Climate adaptation research for the agrarian sector has tended to focus on drought risk, groundwater depletion, livelihood adaptation, migration, and gendered vulnerability as separate streams of literature and has often considered governance as a background phenomenon rather than as a result of climate change, which is itself a stress factor. This renders the need to combine these strands and to more directly question the links between ecological stress and governance change. The paper is about to fill that gap by conducting a thematic review of the literature in the field of climate adaptation, drought, groundwater stress, and governance in the Barind Tract of Bangladesh. Thematic synthesis was employed to analyze 37 empirical and conceptual studies, using a combination of deductive coding based on an initial conceptual framework, and the inductive coding of emerging descriptive categories. It frames the concept of governance reconfiguration that changes in the rules, relationships of authority, and day-to-day practices of institutions facing ecological stresses as an organizing concept. It also proposes institutional legitimacy as the perceived rightfulness of governing authorities and rules as a key mechanism connecting ecological stresses with institutional change, alongside trust, fairness, participation and compliance as analytically distinct processes. Findings show that climatic variability and groundwater depletion trigger socio-economic reorganization such as livelihood restructuring, mobility, and gendered shifts in labor and responsibility which in turn reshapes legitimacy dynamics and generates governance reconfiguration through the redistribution of authority, shifts between formal and informal rules, and institutional adjustment. These relationships are synthesized into an interpretive, design-based framework of adaptive governance. As the review is based on academic literature rather than on primary stakeholder data or formal governance documents, its claims are best read as an analytically grounded interpretation of a defined literature rather than as a comprehensive empirical account of the Barind Tract governance system.