‘Giving people back the governance systems is what failing forward perhaps looks like’ 

It took Bangladeshi NGO Uttaran numerous interactions and engagements with communities in vulnerable settings to realise its approach to working with them was flawed. Over the past few years, it has changed course, reimagining what community-led projects should embody in practice.

As a rights-based organisation, Uttaran began working with civil society leaders and community members in Southwest coastal Bangladesh since the early 1990s on numerous intersectional advocacy projects, including fighting for land rights and addressing waterlogging. Over the past few years, the grassroots non-governmental organisation (NGO) has reorganised its approach to facilitating community-led projects in water governance and climate adaptation: instead of NGO handholding, communities in vulnerable settings will plan, design, budget, and implement projects themselves through direct funding.

This renewed approach to working with communities stemmed from a realisation that cannot be traced back to a single project or programme. It was a collage of initiatives, encounters, dialogues, and interactions with communities over an extended timeframe that taught them the need for collaborative governance. An important principle of Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) approaches, collaborative governance is characterised by calls for negotiated roles and dialogue among multiple actors, ultimately shifting decision-making power to local communities – over what gets built, how, and by whose standards. Incidentally, LLA projects have sometimes genuinely worked towards an equitable shift in planning and decision-making to local stakeholders. However, critiques have argued that such projects often resuscitate the top-down dynamics that LLAs were designed to counter, including the reduced power of local actors in fund allocation; the risk of ‘local elite’ capture; the unaddressed structural inequalities; the dehumanising and depoliticising resilience-focused solutions; and agenda-setting by international actors or funders, among others.

And so the need for collaborative governance is also rooted in the colonial past, said Zahid Amin Shashoto, Uttaran’s Head of Climate Change and Water Governance programme. “For years, people in post-colonial societies forgot how to govern by themselves. With every self-governed, true LLA climate adaptation action, they are reclaiming that knowledge organically, and we need to give them that time and space.”

Arriving at that realisation, however, cost time, money, resources, and negotiations of ideas and expertise.

Re-learning to work with communities

Much of this learning traces back to the collective efforts of Uttaran, communities, and other entities to reintroduce a centuries-old nature-based sediment and tidal water management practice into the formal water governance system. The impoldering introduced by the Dutch in the 1960s not only devolved into a series of environmental fallouts (silted riverbeds, waterlogging, and saltwater intrusion into groundwater), but also social fallout, primarily displacing the traditional community-driven sediment and river management practice, which was later termed Tidal River Management (TRM). While community participation is essential to effective TRM implementation, implementing authorities often disregarded people’s role in local consultation.

TRM was not the only experience that forced Uttaran to rethink how it engaged with communities and the state. For instance, Uttaran began working on land rights in the mid-1990s, although a major success came around 2004, when the Bangladesh government allocated land to the landless communities they advocated for. It was only then that they realised their approach was ineffective. Until 2004, the NGO adopted a confrontational approach, prioritising protest and marches over dialogue and viewing the government understandably as an adversary. It almost always culminated in violence and threats, without commensurate results. “It pushed Uttaran to shift strategy to a ‘negotiated approach’, moving from confrontation to coordination with administrators, and focusing on dialogue and holding officials accountable while understanding why processes were slow. It produced better and more concrete outcomes, including land distribution to landless farmers,” said Zahid, adding it underscored the value of negotiating between different stakeholders to surmount an impasse.

Zahid recounted another anecdote that inspired Uttaran’s shift in approach towards communities. Unlike Dhaka, where the government subsidised water testing, distribution and pipeline maintenance, Southwest Bangladesh lacked testing, infrastructure, and subsidies. Seeing this as unjust, Uttaran spent $60,000 (own funds, Corporate Social Responsibility funds, and grants) to build an overhead tank and a groundwater pipeline system, skipping a feasibility study for lack of funds. By year two, the project proved unsustainable: households were too scattered for cost-effective testing and distribution, and without Dhaka-level subsidies, Uttaran could not sustain it. Zahid reflected that they had replicated a “foreign” urban model in a rural context, guided by emotion and values rather than vernacular knowledge. The failure was not about choosing the wrong infrastructure, but about choosing on communities’ behalf. Uttaran’s real fix, then, was to work closely with communities to rethink, redesign, and develop locally appropriate models rather than adopting a foreign model.

In 2022, Uttaran collaborated with the Dutch government’s Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) for the Reversing the Flow (RtF) programme, which provides longer-term funding directly to communities in vulnerable settings. Much like Uttaran, whose approach evolved through a series of projects that revealed shortcomings in its earlier methods, RVO’s collaboration has also been shaped by lessons learned from its multiple interventions in Bangladesh.

Besides the RVO specifications that the projects focus on water and climate adaptation, LLA and resilience practices, communities could choose their leaders, identify their own priorities, and decide how to manage funds to implement projects that address their immediate socio-economic and environmental challenges at a landscape level (a landscape comprised one village or a cluster of villages beside a canal or a floodplain). Uttaran transferred the entire amount to each landscape’s bank accounts.

When communities relearn to govern

Like any international development projects, community-led projects, too, run into challenges and failures. However, instead of hand-holding community members to make the putatively ‘right’ decision, Uttaran’s objective was to step back and let the community encounter failure and apply their learnings to the next course of action. The goal was to remind communities in vulnerable settings of their agency and right to self-govern their socio-economic realities. “We only ensure all projects abide by four principles: pro-gender, pro-people with intersectional vulnerabilities, pro-environment, and pro-poor. People found these a reasonable ask and adopted them into their projects,” said Zahid.

Zahid illustrated his point with an example: In Southwest Bangladesh, communities agreed to build dykes to protect their homes and land from tidal surges. The core group of the village, which leads all projects, set a timeline, earmarked $8,000, and began the work during the monsoon. But a heavy shower caused part of the dyke to collapse, sparking conflict within the community. “We anticipated this, but we did not intervene. It was their engagement, and a failure that they had to recognise and resolve,” said Zahid. The main committee decided that they would not handle the technical work but would only facilitate decisions. If it is a dyke, only people with experience living near or working on dykes will be part of the implementation team. “The initial approach had overlooked the valuable insights of those with lived experience. They realised the importance of harnessing the knowledge and experience that already existed within the community. In a sense, they were relearning and restructuring their governance,” Zahid reflected.

However, communities governing themselves do not always guarantee ‘fair’ governance on the ground, said Zahid. It threatens the equal distribution of decision-making power among the community members, especially in heterogeneous communities – a mix of elite, poor, landless, and caste groups – where decisions tend to favour the elite. “For instance, a seemingly community-led decision to spend around $14,000 on a road turned out to be influenced by two powerful shrimp farmers, not the villagers’ actual needs. It showed how participatory decisions can mask elite capture, and how easily that goes unnoticed without someone on the ground willing to dig into who really benefits,” he said, explaining the pitfalls of community-led initiatives in highly unequal societies.

However, Zahid cautioned against writing off these challenges as failures, and justifying not allocating funds and shifting decision-making power to community-driven projects. “If NGOs found no success, it is often recorded as ‘a good learning opportunity’. Contrarily, community failures are often written off as ‘a failed approach’, risking an abrupt severance of funding,” he noted. Instead, he encouraged international development agencies and practitioners working on such projects to observe and learn how communities make decisions, implement plans, fail, learn, unlearn, and redo when given the freedom, space, and resources – “particularly because once donors, INGOs and grassroots NGOs leave eventually, it will be the communities who have to work alongside their government, and lead and sustain the adaptation efforts,” he reminded.

Addressing such ground-level challenges, he learnt, also demanded trust, time, and patience as investment. When residents are given ownership of funds, planning, budgeting and implementation, it may seem like a waste of resources – only when viewed from a short-term perspective. “When considered over a longer timeframe, we can observe how communities have broken away from NGO-designed development projects. They build their own assets, trade, understand their own capabilities, and reactivate their power and agency within societies. This will take five to seven years, and that is when you expect resilience, not within a year,” said Zahid.

Uttaran’s Failing Forward story is a reminder of what community-driven or people-led projects should look like in practice; not steered by NGOs or funders towards their own interests and understandings. Programmes built on collaborative governance – providing longer-term funds with a hands-off approach and interdependent partnership – are needed experiments in a sector that stubbornly continues the systematic top-down imposition of Western standards and, in the process, invisibilises other practices and reinforces societal hierarchies. If institutional frameworks such as the Logical Framework or numerical targets are the only focus, the top-down machinery will stymie the exercise of locally led adaptation plans, and continue to fail. As Zahid said, “Giving people back the governance systems is what failing forward perhaps looks like.”