Substantial progress has been seen in the drinking water supply as per the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), but achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), particularly SGD 6.1 regarding safely managed drinking water with much more stringent targets, is considered as a development challenge. The problem is more acute in low-income water-scarce hard-to-reach areas such as the southwest coastal region of Bangladesh, where complex hydrogeological conditions and adverse water quality contribute to a highly vulnerable and insecure water environment. Following the background, this study investigated the challenges and potential solutions to drinking water insecurity in a water-scarce area of southwest coastal Bangladesh using a mixed-methods approach. The findings revealed that water insecurity arises from unimproved, deteriorated, unaffordable, and unreliable sources that have significant time and distance burdens. High rates of technical dysfunction of the existing water infrastructure contribute to water insecurity as well. Consequently, safely managed water services are accessible to only 12% of the population, whereas 64% of the population does not have basic water. To reach the SDG 6.1 target, this underserved community needs well-functioning readily accessible water infrastructure with formal institutional arrangement rather than self-governance, which seems unsuccessful in this low-income context. This study will help the government and its development partners in implementing SDG action plans around investments to a reliable supply of safe water to the people living in water-scarce hard-to-reach coastal areas.

This paper introduces the concept of “Participatory Convergence” as a framework to meet grand social-ecological challenges. Participatory Convergence combines the principles of Convergence Research with Participatory Action Research (PAR), offering a novel approach to tackling complex societal problems. Convergence Research seeks to foster high-level integration between diverse disciplines to address multifaceted issues, emphasizing systems thinking and solutions orientation; however, existing literature falls short in providing practical models for the deep integration of diverse disciplines, community partners, and community members. This paper aims to bridge these gaps by integrating Convergence Research with PAR. We illustrate the application of Participatory Convergence with a case study: the “Action for Water Equity” project, focusing on water challenges faced by communities in U.S. colonias along the U.S.–Mexico border. The Action for Water Equity project is a practical example of how Participatory Convergence can be applied to tackle pressing challenges while embracing diversity, inclusivity, and adaptability. This approach holds the potential to facilitate comprehensive solutions for global challenges and foster meaningful change through interdisciplinary collaboration, community engagement, and a commitment to sustainability and equity.

Household water insecurity is an accelerating global challenge with serious negative impacts on human health. The impacts of water insecurity can vary among household members. Biocultural buffering theory can explain the differential allocation of scarce water within households and predicts asymmetric allocation of scarce pooled resources to protect the most vulnerable. To test the buffering theory of intra-household water allocation strategies. Twenty reproductive-age women from extremely water-insecure households in Dhaka, Bangladesh, were interviewed and systematically-coded text from the guided interviews and an allocation task were analysed. Coding revealed 261 instances of buffering. Thematic analysis of allocation reasoning revealed patterning in water distribution within the household. Household management of scarce water aligns to buffering theories, with women prioritising family members perceived to be vulnerable. These findings open new spaces to theorise how intra-household strategies of water allocation shape individual risk and safeguard human health, reconceptualise the dominant paradigm of negative experiences around living with water insecurity to encompass notions of care and shared wellbeing, and develop more sophisticated views of the mechanisms to connect embodied water insecurity to its individual-level health consequences in human biology.