Abstract The construction of bandals (bamboo walls) is a widely practised climate adaptation initiative in Bangladesh, embodying community agency. This article interrogates how it can also represent locally‐led maladaptation —adaptive efforts that inadvertently sustain or exacerbate the very risks they seek to address. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a riparian community, this photo essay examines our initial misinterpretation of a bandal project as successful locally‐led adaptation, and our subsequent reinterpretation of it as a configuration of three interrelated forms of responsibility: ‘self‐responsibility’, wherein at‐risk communities act under constraint; ‘passive responsibility’, manifested through fragmented expert and institutional knowledge; and ‘reactive responsibility’, embedded in public resource distribution patterns reflecting a logic of impact‐triggered humanitarian aid that constrains adaptive potential. We argue that, in the absence of active and proactive responsibilities assumed by a range of local actors, self‐responsibility is coerced, responsibilising at‐risk people and producing maladaptation. Locally‐led adaptation, therefore, ought to move beyond a solely community‐based framing towards a collectively accountable process.
Ji et al. (Thu,) studied this question.