Beyond adaptive capacity: Assessing how power relations shape household responses to climate impacts on water and sanitation

In the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector, there is growing recognition that climate change presents serious risks to water and sanitation services, with widespread implications for health. At the same time, existing indicator development efforts in the water sector emphasize technical actions taken by water and sanitation service providers. Greater attention is needed to how users of WASH services deal with climate impacts, including power relations that mediate how individuals and households negotiate this adaptation. Here we develop an “adaptive power” framework that integrates conventional adaptive capacity domains with previously underexamined power relations, and apply this framework to a case focusing on climate impacts on water and sanitation services. These adaptive power indicators span individual, household, and community levels and were tested in Satkhira, Bangladesh, a region experiencing a range of climate impacts that threaten water and sanitation services. Findings showed that some conventional indicators of adaptive capacity such as measures of wealth were not linked to knowledge of how to deal with climate change impacts on water and sanitation in this case. Instead, individual attitudes towards water-related gender norms, control over assets, and intra-household decision-making power (e.g., who decides to make investments in household water infrastructure) were significant contributors. Our findings demonstrate that inclusive and effective climate adaptation requires explicit attention to who holds power over resources, decisions, and adaptive processes themselves.