This study examines flood-induced vulnerabilities among women in northern Bangladesh. Poor and disadvantaged women are more vulnerable to disasters than men due to the conditions that predispose them to severe disaster impacts. Women suffer from physical injuries and are often evicted from their dwellings due to floods. Difficulties in finding adequate shelter, food, safe water, and fuel for cooking, as well as problems in maintaining personal hygiene and sanitation, prevent women from performing their usual roles at home. All of these are problems related to women’s gender identity and social roles. Many poor and destitute women remain unemployed during and after floods. Women also suffer from domestic violence and are subject to harassment when taking shelter or refuge at community centers. These particular vulnerabilities and problems interrupt women’s mitigation efforts and adaptation capacities in disaster risk reduction.

Purpose: Existing literature on how social learning stemming from flood experience influences management and adaptation to flood-risks, and resilience-building is scant. In this context, the purpose of this study is to map the processes and examine the application of social learning in formulating coping measures and adaptation strategies in Bangladesh's wetland communities.Design/methodology/approach: To bridge this research gap, conceptually, we formulated the Social Learning from Disasters (SLD) Framework to explain the process of social learning from flood experience and the mechanism of its influence on community resilience. Applying a qualitative research approach, the empirical investigation was carried out in the Fenarbak Union of Sunamganj District, Bangladesh. Using a participatory approach and qualitative techniques, the required primary data were procured.Findings: The results of the study yielded three key findings: (1) social learning and memory have often enabled wetland communities to adopt diverse coping and adaptive measures in response to flash floods; (2) social learning-based actions have resulted in reduced flood-risk and enhanced community resilience to flash floods, especially when these actions were supported by both local and external innovations and (3) the aforementioned social learning stemmed primarily from first-hand experience of flash floods, which was shared via various collective learning platforms.Research limitations/implications: The study followed a participatory methodology and the data were procured from two communities in the union level unit of Bangladesh. Therefore, generalization to apply to the larger context should be made with caution. Also, the study represents a cross-sectional study, and thus understanding of the long-term trend is not possible.Practical implications: The findings of the study have direct and profound implications for local community-level disaster-risk planning. As there are serious deficiencies in documenting and preserving social learning for community resilience and development planning, this study offers a conceptual framework, along with empirical evidence, for transforming these lessons learned into practical actions for change.Social implications: The findings of the study highlight the importance of social learning as a collective effort and provide empirical evidence of innovative adaptations to change. These results are critical to formulating societal strategies for disaster-risk management as well as to enhance community resilience.Originality/value: Limited efforts have hitherto been made to determine (1) how the actual process of social learning from disaster shocks takes place, and (2) how innovative adaptation strategies lead vulnerable communities to take up social learning-based actions. Our research attempts to fill these knowledge gaps by providing an evidence-based account of community resilience-building responses to flash flood disasters.

The fundamental processes of policy shifts emphasize how policy problems emerge and how policy decisions are made to overcome previous shortcomings. In Bangladesh, flood management policies may also have been driven by policy failures and flood-disaster events. In this context, we examined how policy shifts occurred in the country from 1947 to 2019 in areas of water management and flood prevention, control, and risk mitigation. To understand the nature of these policy shifts, we examined the evolutionary processes of flood management policies, the associated drivers, and the roles of key actors. Our findings reveal that policy transitions were influenced primarily by the predominance of the structural intervention paradigm and by catastrophic flood events. Such transitions were nonlinear due to multiple interest groups who functioned as contributors to, as well as barriers against, flood prevention policies. Policy debates over environmental concerns helped bring about a shift from a primary focus on structural intervention to a mixed approach incorporating various nonstructural interventions. Furthermore, our results suggest that the shifts in flood management policies have resulted in some degree of reliance on a “people-centered” approach rather than solely an “engineering coalition”, which emphasizes the pivotal role of community members in decision making and the implementation of flood policies and programs.

The impacts of climate change‐related disasters have garnered significant attention in policy discourse and scientific research, particularly in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). However, the impacts of climate change‐induced disaster shocks on social structure and equity (i.e., social inequality effects) in LMICs are under‐researched and poorly understood. We conduct a systematic literature review to better understand how climate‐change‐related disasters affect the distribution of income, wealth, and well‐being in agrarian LMICs. Using a conceptual approach that focuses on the disproportionality in climate‐related disaster risks, as well as their impacts and burdens, we analyze the literature by retrieving research papers from the Scopus ( n = 596), ScienceDirect ( n = 644), and Web of Science ( n = 583) databases. Most reviewed studies suggest that climate change‐related disasters tend to exacerbate socioeconomic and sociodemographic inequalities, particularly between small and large landholders in agrarian societies in LMICs, though only a few document reductions in these inequalities. The opportunity to reduce and transform climate‐related risks into adaptive capacity, enabling marginalized groups to equalize their share of climate burdens, is being taken up by only a few farmers. We posit that, without appropriate interventions for equity and social justice, climate change impacts are likely to generate, ceteris paribus, cascading adverse impacts on social equality. Our findings underscore the need to adopt an equity and social justice approach in climate change research, and we call for the adoption of a Social Inequality‐lens‐based policy approach, along with the formulation of social equity‐ and climate justice‐based adaptation programming. This article is categorized under: Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Observed Impacts of Climate Change Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies