Governing Climate Migration in Bangladesh: An Exploratory Analysis of Policies, Institutions, and Adaptation Challenges

Abstract

While Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate-induced human mobility, the governance of human mobility has received much less attention than the drivers of mobility. This article poses the question of how the country’s policy framework, institutional mandates, and adaptation constraints shape (or do not shape) the governance of climate-induced internal migration. An exploratory qualitative design is used, with codebook thematic analysis of 71 policy, legal, international organization, scholarly, and civil society documents from 2009 to 2026, based on multi-level governance theory and reported using the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research and the READ approach to policy document analysis. Climate mobility is widely acknowledged in policy language, and poorly regulated in practice. There are six ministries, each of which has part of a mandate, but not the whole. The Delta Plan 2100 defines out-migration as failure and introduces targets for reducing it; the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) considers climate migrants as an attribute of an urban intervention, and the Third Nationally Determined Contribution (2025) mentions displacement as one of the national circumstances, but has no specific mobility or planned-relocation measure among its 65 adaptation interventions. The remit for in-migration is not statutory for local government, where it takes place, nor do they have the fiscal power to have one. The article introduces the concept of a mandate vacuum, a development of the multi-level governance theory, which assumes competencies to be distributed, and compares it to the most similar previous study of multi-level adaptation governance in Bangladesh, and presents it as a series of six sequential reforms with indicators, baselines, and a political feasibility assessment.