Bangladesh’s locally led adaptation framework gives Union Parishads a bigger climate role, but limited funding, authority, staff and accountability could hinder implementation.
Imagine our Union Parishad (UP) is now one of the key institutions responsible for protecting our area from climate change. Under Bangladesh’s new National Framework and Action Plan for Locally Led Adaptation, approved by the Cabinet on 15 May 2025, UPs and Upazila Parishads (UZPs) are expected to assess local climate risks, plan adaptation actions and coordinate climate decisions through new local climate committees. That sounds promising. But it raises a harder question: what happens when responsibility moves closer to the community, while the authority, money and technical capacity needed to act stay where they are?
The idea behind the framework is a good one. For years, climate money and climate decisions in Bangladesh have been shaped mostly through central institutions and donor projects, with limited decision-making power at the local level. This framework tries to flip that script. It puts UPs and UZPs, the government bodies closest to communities, at the centre of climate action. It also points toward future mechanisms for local climate financing, including testing local taxation. These are important ambitions. But they are not the same as new fiscal or decision-making powers today.
The framework itself recognises the problem. Its own feasibility assessment finds that UPs and UZPs have no real authority from Dhaka to act on climate issues, no dedicated budget for it, and not enough trained staff to handle the technical work.
That last point is not abstract. A UP serving around 25,000 people has one secretary, one accounts assistant and ten village police on its payroll. No engineer, no planner, no one whose job is climate. Its development money arrives as a block grant from Dhaka, divided by a national formula, and none of it is set aside for climate adaptation or disaster risk reduction.
To its credit, the framework does not simply name these problems and leave them there. It proposes a capacity-needs assessment, a capacity-building roadmap, training principles and modules, and pilot initiatives involving institutions such as the Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre (BPATC), the National Institute of Local Government (NILG) and the National Agriculture Training Academy (NATA).
So the question is not whether the government has identified the capacity gap. The harder question is whether these solutions come with firm deadlines, costed plans and guaranteed allocations. A roadmap can identify the road. Local governments still need the resources and the authority to travel it.
There is also a deeper habit at play. Bangladesh talks about decentralisation often but tends to hold real power at the centre. Money, technical approval and final decisions still flow from ministries in Dhaka. A climate committee at the union level is only as good as the authority and funds that actually reach it.
Bangladesh is not starting from zero either. For close to a decade, the Local Government Initiative on Climate Change (LoGIC) has been doing much of what the framework now proposes, channelling climate finance through local government in 94 unions, about two percent of the country. It gave performance-based grants for community schemes and direct grants to the most vulnerable households, and in the rural districts almost all of those household grants went to women. That is a real gain, and it reached people who are usually reached last.
As part of research examining how LoGIC aligns with locally led adaptation principles, I visited Tahirpur Upazila in Sunamganj and spoke with UP and UZP officials and local communities. What I heard was not a complaint about money. Officials described transfers that were transparent and closely tracked. The strain was elsewhere. In the haor, the dry season leaves a narrow window for construction, while the grant runs on an annual budget cycle. Performance assessment, repeated reporting and multi-stage validation all take time. For an office with one secretary, meeting that standard inside a short window is hard. LoGIC ran on the project’s rhythm, and the UP had to keep up with it.
So what happens now that LoGIC has ended? Can local government carry this on its own budget, or does climate money need another route to the ground altogether? The reporting and verification that make LoGIC credible are also what make it demanding, and a project was paying for them. Bangladesh has seen this pattern before. Under the Standing Orders on Disaster, every union already has a Disaster Management Committee, chaired by the UP Chairman and required to meet every month. A 2023 study across six coastal unions found that NGOs were arranging those meetings in four of them, and that where NGO support stopped, the committee’s activity was disrupted. A committee mandated by national order, still running largely on someone else’s project. Getting the money to move is only the first problem.
Because even if it does move, a second question follows: who actually benefits once it reaches the ground? Union politics in Bangladesh is not free from favouritism and local power plays. Without strong monitoring and complaint mechanisms, devolving budget decisions opens the door to elite capture, and climate funds could end up serving the well-connected rather than the poor, women, young people, people with disabilities and other marginalised groups the framework says it wants to protect.
The framework does recognise the importance of monitoring and grievance mechanisms. The real test is how they work in practice. Communities need to know how funds are allocated, how decisions are disclosed, how projects can be monitored, where grievances can be filed and what happens when funds are misused. Who sits on these committees matters as much as whether they exist. LoGIC reached women because it was designed and required to. The framework is far less specific about who must sit on the committees it proposes.
None of this takes away from what the framework is trying to do. Locally led adaptation is the right direction, and the document deserves credit for naming the barriers that have long limited local climate action. But naming a problem and resourcing a response are not the same thing.
As the framework moves from paper to practice, the test is not whether climate committees get formed. It is whether predictable finance, clear timelines, real authority and accountability follow them down. Bangladesh cannot simply transfer responsibility downward. It has to transfer the power to act along with it.
Author’s Bio: Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon is a Research Officer at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). His research explores across climate change adaptation, loss and damage, forest governance, and climate-induced displacement. He can be reached at ranon.jahan@icccad.org
