 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to this second masterclass of the masterclass series, Urbanizing Deltas of the World, the State of the Art of Water Research in South and Southeast Asia. In this masterclass series, we have PhD and postdoc researchers from various projects of the NWO Urbanizing Deltas of the World program, and they present their work and discuss their lessons learned from their years of research activities with you. So welcome, my name is Jaap Evers and I'm a lecturer in water and environmental policy at IHE Delft. Today's topic is thinking about complex urbanizing systems. And today we have two speakers. That's Dr. Sanjayan Nath and Mr. Badrul Hassan. And they are giving their talk and discussing their work with you of their previous years. And let me go straight to the introduction of our first speaker. First speaker is Dr. Sanjayan Nath and the topic of his presentation will be public policy and governance of social ecological systems. Sanjayan was a postdoctoral researcher in the NWO UDW Project Living Polders. And currently he's an assistant professor in public policy and governance at the Indian Institute of Technology in Tirupati. He completed his postdoctoral research from the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University here in the Netherlands. And he got a PhD in public policy from the School of Public Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science in Indiana University Bloomington in the USA. With that being said, I introduce Dr. Sanjayan and I give the floor to him. And we have the same rules of engagement as in our first master class. So Dr. Sanjayan will give a presentation of about 30 minutes. During that time you can put and write your comments in the comment boxes either at YouTube or Facebook or in one of the two where you have been logged in. When you write the comments we are collecting them together. I do that today again with Leon Hermans and Shanur Hassan. And after the second presentation by Batur Hassan we are forwarding the questions to them in a Q&A session. I hope this is all clear and let me give the floor to Sanjayan. Welcome Sanjayan to this master class. I'm very happy that you are with us and please the floor is yours. Hi, good morning to people in Europe and good afternoon to people in India. And it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks Yap and thanks Aichi for making this possible. I'm going to move straight to my presentation now. Let me just check. So hi, good afternoon again. I'm going to narrow down, I'm going to start off with a brief introduction of the project in general and then narrow down on this particular one particular research article which is titled Metal Models, Performance and Institutional Fit. So to give you a brief background I have worked in the US and in the Netherlands. If you look at the map on the right hand side that's where I did my PhD. You know it was next to Lake Michigan and my field site was in India. If you can see my cursor move. And then I moved my postdoc to Europe and my field site was very next to my hometown. In India, Bangladesh and my hometown are very close to each other. And I also have some experience working in other sectors. The project of which I was a part was actually a part of the second call for proposals of the Urbanizing Deltas of the World Program by NWO. The main applicant of this project was Dr. Fangran Lyrovin of Copernicus Institute and here are two other co-applicants, Dr. Hans Middlecoupe of Utrecht University and Dr. Bernard Traffer of EWAG. And for this research I was assisted by a large number of research assistants from Kulna University primarily and also from Independent University in Bangladesh and also from A-Train India. I think I'd like to point out three RAs who really made important contributions to my research. Afsana, who kind of helped me complete my first research project when the project was really going slow. Mandira, who helped me with the second research article. And Nishat Sharmin, who helped complete our research amidst the pandemic. Nishat I think was one of my best RAs I've ever come across. So to give you a brief background, I'd like to show you two videos. The first video will be boulders from the Netherlands and the second video is a boulder from Bangladesh. So the first video, I captured this video when I was biking along the boulders. I spent a lot of time in Netherlands biking through the boulders. And the second video is when I was doing my research in Bangladesh, traveling from one boulder to another by boat. So let me share the first video. It's going to take some time. My machine is slightly slow. I think we can, hold on. I think let's skip the video. It's taking too long. Let me move on to my next slide. To give you a brief background of the study site, Bangladesh is located right next to India around 8 hours by flight from the Netherlands. If we narrow down the focus, look at Bangladesh in general. It's next to the Bengali speaking part of India. It's surrounded on all sides by India and partly by Myanmar. In Bangladesh, if you look at the map on the right, the whole country is considered to be a delta. But the delta is in different forms in different parts of the country. Our research was mainly focused on the matured delta part. If you see in the map, Khulna district, Shatkira, that region essentially. It's called a matured delta mainly because its connectivity to the upper upstream rivers have been completely disrupted because of manmade reasons and also because of natural reasons. In this region, in the matured delta part, the country has around 100 plus polders. The number actually is disputed, but there are more than 100 polders. What you see on the map on the right-hand side is the matured delta part of Bangladesh categorized into different polders which are mainly known by the numbers. Our research primarily was focused in this region around Khulna, polders 2025, 2122 and the region in between. Now, let me kind of take you through this concept called polder and this concept called TRM. A polder is essentially, in very simple terms, a piece of land which is surrounded by embankments on all sides. Outside the embankment, we have river and the flow of water from the river into the land is controlled by Swiss gates on the embankment. This water which goes in is then directed using channels to shrimp farms, to agricultural land. The land inside the polder also has houses, people living in their community going on, human society in general. A polder is essentially a large social hydrological system where land-water interacts closely and this interface is governed by this embankment. Now, essentially, if you look at the history of Bangladesh, in very simplified brief terms, the country suffered from flooding, pre-independence, post-independence in the 1970s. And that's when plans came in, you know, in collaboration with USAID and the Dutch government to build embankments around the rivers. And this essentially, the first phase came to be known as a CEP project. Now, what happened, you know, these embankments, which essentially were based on the polders of Netherlands. The Netherlands is the country where the idea of polders essentially originated. When these polders came up, if you look at the figure where my mouse is moving, what you see in the first part of the figure is this rounded part which essentially represents a river. So before the polders came in, you know, the river would flood and the water would spread across on both sides into the lands nearby, agricultural land. Fertile sediments would flow into the lands and this would provide huge, you know, large agricultural productivity. At the same time, people who are living next to these rivers were suffering immensely. Huge human strategy. So there was this huge discussion on how to balance this trade-off, you know. The need for humans to live a comfortable life versus the need for fertile agricultural land. So at this time, what people decided, administrative decided was to build embankments, polders along river banks. And what you see in the second figure where my mouse is moving is this embankments which came up. Now when these embankments came up, as you can see, flooding stopped. You know, the soil, the fertile soil which had been deposited earlier ensured that the productivity of agricultural land continued for some time. But then trouble started in the mid or early 1980s. Because these embankments came up, water logging began to take place within the agricultural lands between the polders. So if you see these brown parts, these are the polders, the embankments along the rivers. And water logging started there. At the same time, the fertile soil, which at one time could flow during floods into the surrounding land, started getting accumulated in the river banks. So this led to twin trouble. You know, this river started drying up Bangladesh, which was known for its mighty rivers. Some of these rivers got completely, they became, they got converted to canals in simple terms. At the same time, water logging increased and the problems that people were suffering pre-polderization in some ways began to come back. And that's when, you know, people, local people in some ways, in very simplified terms, if I can explain it, people started breaching the polders, you know. So they created these temporary holes in the embankments and let the water flow back into the lands. And this continued for some time for a few rivers and then they would close it. So this practice, you know, where people would breach embankments next to rivers, breach the polder embankments next to rivers to ensure that the land water dynamics went back to the pre-polder stage, essentially began to be known as tidal river management, once technocrats started getting involved. So TRM essentially is a phenomenon which began as a local community driven initiative to ensure that Bangladesh lands benefited both from polderization and from fertile soil reaching the lands. But when technocrats came in, you know, they decided to do further studies and they decided to call it TRM. Now, let me kind of pause here and think back a bit. You know, if you look at polders as a concept, it's a very technocratic concept which started in the Netherlands. And when you look at TRM, it's a very much of a community driven concept which later on got adopted by technocrats. When you think of polders in Bangladesh, it's a technocratic concept which was brought in from abroad, from lands far away into Bangladesh. TRM on the other hand originated within the local community out there. And therefore, you know, when we were doing our research, it really got us thinking, you know, because we were talking about governing polders. We are talking of governing this complex socio-ideological systems, human-environmental interactions in the system. And we are wondering, do people really understand what a polder is? Do people really understand polders as well as TRM? You know, because our basic assumption was that something which was imported from far away, people do not really understand. But something like TRM which had originated within the lands, people would understand. And that really got us to do this part of the research, you know. But we wanted to understand what people thought about polders. Did they really know what local people describing polders to us in the same way that technocrats were? Did local people and technocrats look at TRM in the same way? So that's why we went back and decided to study the mental models of local people, of technocrats, of politicians, of all people associated with the governance, people who live in the polders who govern the polders. We wanted to see whether they are understanding whether their mental model of polders and whether the mental model of TRM was the same. Was it similar? Was it different? And what did it mean about governing polders? What if local people looked at polders differently from technocrats? What if local people looked at TRM differently from polders? Did it mean that the governance of polders was affected because of this difference or the similarities or the difference in mental models? What did it mean ultimately about how these polders would be governed? You know, that's what got us thinking into this project. So kind of go back and look at how we had structured the larger living polders project in general. We had started at the delta level, published an article, looked at the regional level, published three articles. The mental models article that I'm going to talk to you about right now, essentially a part of that. And we've also done some research at the bill level. One of the articles of which is currently we are in the writing phase. This was a very interdisciplinary project. There was a governance work package, which has been handled by me. And there was a hydrologic package, which is handled by Fidoz Islam. And then later on, these two projects were going to be integrated. I was not a part of the project. I had moved on to my new job by then when the integration was supposed to take place. So today, like I've mentioned, we are essentially looking at how mental models affects governance of polders. So the research question, which we're interested in is what factors influence stakeholder mental models in polders, in social handling systems like the polders and while governing management systems like TRM. And how do these mental models affect performance outcomes during implementing TRM and while managing polders? So we are interested in these two different concepts, polders and TRM, one of which is where technocratic in nature, technocratic derived and TRM, which is very locally derived. And we are trying to understand where the difference in people's understanding. If you look at, when we think of model mental models, we essentially try to understand how people understand polders. We are trying to look at their mental maps, which is what we call mental models. And then you're trying to see how mental models affect performance. So the research methodology we pursued for this was to first develop a reference model of polders in TRM. For this, we went back and looked at public literature and we identified concepts. And using mental maps, using the software called mental model, we devised mental models of a theoretical mental model of polder and a theoretical mental model of TRM. So essentially what these mental models did was identified concepts and how they are linked with each other. So we had around, let's say polders having 50 concepts which are linked together using 100 connections. That's how these reference models were developed. Then we went back to local people, to local stakeholders, to local administrators, regional public officials, national level public officials, local politicians, people who live and work in the polders and we did interviews with them. In this interviews, we tried to understand what they understood about polders and what they understood about TRM. We tried to understand their mental models. So what we did is we went to this region and I'll explain the region in further more detail after some slides. And we told them, so you live here, what do you think is a polder? And they would tell something to us. And then we would use this funneling technique. So whatever they told us, we would pick up those concepts and probe deeper and try to understand how they actually describe polders. How did they look at polders? In their minds, what was this image of polders? And we did the same thing for tidal river management. And the same time we asked them questions, how is this polder in what kind of state is it? Do you think people living are in a very vulnerable condition? Do you think this polder is badly damaged? Do you think it's not resilient enough? And we did this, I'm using technical terms but we did this in much more locally understandable language. So once we had connected these interviews, we coded these interviews to develop the metal models of these stakeholders. And we did this by developing adjacency matrix. Adjacency matrix essentially is a list of concepts represented using matrix where the connections are represented using 1 and 0. So let's say somebody says, for me a polder is a piece of road for connectivity to the mainland, to Tukulna. So we would have two concepts, connectivity and road. And they would be connected together using 1 because roads lead to connectivity. Or somebody could say a polder essentially is an embankment, is a veribad or a vabda which protects us from climate change. So then we would have a concept called veribad, climate change. And because this is positive connection, we use 1. So that's how we use these concepts. We link them together and develop metal models using adjacency matrix of local stakeholders. And then we homogenized these metal maps. We had to compose the metal maps. So we ensured that all the metal models could be compared. Then we aggregated them, developed aggregated metal models. And aggregated metal models were done for different categories of people. So we developed aggregated metal models of local people, we developed aggregated metal models of local politicians. We developed aggregated metal models of blue gold employees, of local public officials, of regional public officials. And then we carried out analysis of metal models using matrix algebra and social network theory. We also did some GIS work and finally we analyzed all this data using regression. And I'll take you through some of the results in a few slides. So you know I was telling you about the interviews we conducted. We conducted interviews with 250 respondents. And what you see here on the right hand side is the number of respondents broken down into the categories I was talking about. So we interviewed 125 local residents, 55 local politicians and so on and so forth. Then if we narrowed on further, we found that only 222 people knew exactly knew what a polder was. The remaining 28 people said no, we don't know what a polder is. And then again you know we have broken down this 222 people according to category. For example, 109 people out of 125 local residents said that they know what a polder is. The remaining 16 people said no, we don't know what a polder is. Same thing we did for TRM. But the strange part was even people who knew polders actually said they did not understand TRM. Now go back to what I said earlier. A polder is a technocratic concept imported from the Netherlands. Local people should really have less familiarity with it. TRM is a local phenomenon. Local people actually developed it on their own. But we find here a very surprising finding that very few people were actually saying that they knew what a TRM was, what TRM was, what it meant for them. So I'll keep this in mind and I'll kind of talk about it more in later slides. Now this is our research site in greater detail. Like I told you, our research was focused on the matured delta part, mainly between polders 24-25 and 21-22. And the reason we picked up this region was because if you look at the map on the right hand side, there is this river which flows from polder 24-25 up here and goes and meets a larger river near polder 21-22. So essentially we conducted our surveys along this river, the Sipsha River, which is known by different names, in between this polder along the polders on both sides of the river. And what you see here are these different political units which overlap with the polders. So if you look at the next slide, these are three different maps of the same region. You see the same river here. On the first figure you have the maps. So Bangladesh is administered along different political levels of political boundaries and unions is the lowest level of governance. It is the smallest level of governance for Bangladesh. Highest probably the country, then we have division, then we have districts on and so forth. So what you see here is the same research site classified according to unions. And what you see here is the same research sites classified into polders and then according to physiographic region. What you wanted to see was if we analyzed our respondents by classifying them according to unions or by polders or by physiographic region, did the understanding vary? So we wanted to see what was really happening there. A physiographic region is essentially an agro-ecological region. In the upstream parts of the river, the agricultural regions are more fertile soil, less saline. The lower parts are more saline, less fertile because of saline pollution and all that. So the whole region can be classified into different unions, different polders and different physiographic regions. The red dots that you see are our respondents. Now, you'll notice that some of the dots are along the rivers. Some of the dots are slightly further away from the rivers and some are slightly more further away. That is because we had applied this transit method for identifying respondents. What we did was we first mapped the river, the total distance from the top of polder 24-25 where it started before it got disrupted to the river on top to the point where it merged with the larger river. So the whole distance, we then divided into five kilometer parts. Every five kilometers, we conducted interviews on both sides of the river. So here, this is the first five kilometer mark, the second five kilometer mark, so on and so forth. Every point, we interviewed two households. And in the first household, we interviewed the male respondent. In the second household, we interviewed the female respondent. Once we interviewed people at five kilometer distances along the rivers, we identified the next motorable road at a distance of five kilometers in land. And we administered interviews there, a similar round of couple of interviews at every five kilometers. And we also did it at slightly larger distances wherever we could find motorable roads at ten kilometer distances. In addition, we focused a larger number of interviews in the TIM regions of the research sites. Now in our research section, it's mainly polder 24 which has TRM taking place. So you'll see a larger section of interviews conducted there because initially when we were conducting interviews, we were really surprised that this disparity that some people did not know what a TRM was whereas a larger number of people knew what TRM was, so what polders were. So you thought, okay, let's go and focus more of our interviews in the TRM regions to see what was happening. Why are fewer people saying that they know what TRM is? And you see the same kind of stakeholder respondent distribution, interview distribution in the three maps. Now this is our theoretical framework. This is essentially what we wanted to study. Let me kind of take you through the first part of the theoretical framework. This block that you see is mental model similarity. Our first hypothesis is that resident characteristics determine mental model similarity. So our assumption could be that in respect of gender, people have the same mental models. Or in respect of age, people have the same mental models. In respect of education, mental models could be similar, so on and so forth. Then look at the second connection. If the mental models of respondents living in a region are similar, then they would have similar perceptions of performance. So let's say there's polar 24. Then all respondents, if the mental models are similar, then that polder would probably, people would say, okay, we have similar impressions about performance in that polder. But this relationship is affected by the context. And what could be the context? We look at two kinds of variables, political and biophysical. So if there's a polder in which local people are involved in addressing the polder, we study that. We study that as rules. Are there locally defined rules for governing the polders? Are the polders more conflict-ridden? So what we wanted to see is this mental model similarity, and this relation between mental model similarity and performance, is it affected by the political context? We also want to look at the biophysical context. If you look at the physiographic map that we looked earlier, so what happens in different physiographic regions? Does mental model similarity or mental model is different? And is this connection between similarity and perceptions different? Is it affected by the biophysical context? That's what we wanted to study. And by looking at this whole relationship, we wanted to see how that affects governance, this idea of institutional fit. Now let me kind of explain to you what institutional fit or misfit means. In a system in which the rules are defined so that they match the underlying political conditions, the underlying social conditions, the underlying ecological conditions. If there's a match between the rules, the institutions and underlying conditions, then there's institutional fit. And theory says that such systems should be well-governed. So if there's a system in which the rules are framed according to local context and people understand the rules well, then that system should be well-governed. So if we go back and link institutional fit to the larger technical framework here, mental model similarity, if mental models are similar of people living in a polder, then that should lead to similar perceptions of performance and that should lead to institutional fit. However, if people do not understand what a polder is, if their understanding of polders is different, then their understanding of governance, their understanding of performance of the polders would be different and that would lead to institutional misfit. Which means that if people did not understand what a polder is, it would mean that a polder is not being governed well, which basically means that local government, regional government should invest more time in ensuring that people understand what polder is. The same thing applies for TRM. If mental models of TRM are similar, then the perceptions of performance should be similar and that should lead to better governance. That is a theoretical framework which you're trying to study and that is the public policy governance, social-hidological system connection that we are studying. Sorry. If you look at this, this is our first result side. The mental models that we derived from our interviews, we identified the most important, which is the concept which most people were talking about to describe polders. What you see here are for those 250 people, out of 222 people who describe polders to us, what did they think a polder was? I want to point out to you three different concepts. Embankment, a lot of people are saying polders are embankments. A second group of people were saying embankment is wabda. Now remember this word, embankment, wabda, and a lot of Goopal were talking about beribas. So although we are talking about polders, people were actually using different concepts to describe a polder. Now let me explain to you what these three concepts are. Embankment in Bengali is baad. It's a part of a polder which is built between the land and the river. In simple terms, when some people were saying polder baad, baad ke amra polder boli. A second group was saying no, polders are beribad ke amra baad boli. Now try to understand the difference between baad and beribad. A baad is built next to a river. A beribad is built within agriculture land or around a pond, around a piece of water in order to separate it from the surrounding agriculture land. It's a smaller dam kind of a thing. So a baad and a beribad are very different concepts. A polder essentially should be a baad. We build embankments along a river. We don't build beribad along a river generally. And a third group of people were calling it wabda. Now this is very interesting. If you go to the polder region of Bangladesh, if you go on a stand on a polder and ask them what it is, they'll say amra wabda ropa tari aachi. A lot of people equate polder to wabda. Now wabda is essentially a governance institution. It was the water management board set up by the Pakistani government because before Bangladesh attained independence. Now look at two important points. One, local people in spite of having attained from Pakistan were still using a Pakistani era term to describe a concept which is now relevant for them. They were not even using the current term for water development board, BWDB. They were not saying embankment is BWDB. They are saying wabda. And they were not distinguishing that it was wabda who created the bath, the embankment of polder, who could have at some point in time been involved. They are confused between a hydrological term and a political term. So keep this in mind. Now let's look at TRM. In TRM we found the same fiddling, this misconception about what TRM essentially means. Most people are talking about it in terms of sedimentation. A lot of people were talking about it in terms of, what was the next? They were talking about in terms of inundation of bill. So in a lot of cases they were talking about creating this village protection dam. When you talk of TRM, essentially it is the bridge created. The first thing that should come in mind when people say TRM is that we breached the dam. But no, they were using a wide variety of terms. In the minds of local people, it was this once a bridge had been created and then a kind of a dam, a local Bherimath is built around this local water body, the village protection dam. They equate TRM to that. They are not even talking about a bridge. So even local people who live in that region are not sure about what TRM actually means. So keep this in mind as we move to the next slide. Now what we have done here is mapped all our interviews using swan plots. So what you see are these interviews as swams. And we have used four different metal model concepts, total components, total connections, density and weighted clustering coefficient to mark out our interviews. So what you see the black parts are the individual metal models and the colored dots, these are the collective metal models which are aggregated of the individual metal models. So if you look here, this is the aggregated metal model of the residents. First thing, most people appear to be the metal models of most people in some ways, if you took at the concepts, they are using a very, very smaller number of concept, smaller number of connections with very low density or medium density to describe the metal models. Metal models of most respondents irrespective of whether they were local officials, local politicians, blue guard employees, NGOs, they were very, very simplistic. Now this in some ways is a contradiction of theory. If you look at theory, they would say that public officials have a richer metal model which is more theoretically oriented. Theoretical metal models would kind of be similar to public official metal models. But we found out when we interviewed the public officials, they appeared to be very simple metal models that they were using. But here it could just be that because we were doing telephone interviews, some of them, they were just giving us similar metal models because of the research method too. But more than that, what's the most stark contradiction is that most metal models are very similar, simplistic, collective metal models are more complex and try to understand this difference. If collecting metal models are more complex as compared to some of the individual metal models, it means the individual metal models are very different from each other. They could be simplistic, but they're different. So some people are saying, men pulled as an embankment, some are saying very bad, some are saying roads. A lot of people are saying a porter is a road. Same thing for TRM. We again see the same kind of cluster, the collective metal models appear to be very similar to each other, but they're very different from the individual metal models. Now, this is an expansion of the previous slide. What we have tried to see is how these collective metal models, how are they similar or different from theoretical metal models? So ideally, if the local metal models are correct, if they are describing polders correctly, then the collective metal models, they should be wide overlap. This part, this part outside, this spring and green part, they should be thinner. So if the metal models of local people are theoretically aligned, if they're more accurate in some ways, they would be more overlap. It would be something like this. But what we find is that when we compare theoretical models to collective metal models, the collective metal model of local officials or local politicians, they are very, very different from the theoretical model models. They are not so accurate. On the other hand, collective metal models appear to be quite similar to each other. So although there is wide disparity in individual metal models, collective metal models become similar, which means that irrespective of whether it's local resident, local politicians or NGOs, most of these respondents don't know what a polder is and they are very different from the theoretically accurate metal models. This is a similar kind of description of TIRM. So in very simple terms, mental models of local respondents, either of a technocratic concept like polders or a locally derived, locally community derived concept like TIRM. One, they are different from each other. Some of them are probably slightly accurate. A lot of them are completely accurate and because of this, the collective metal models are inaccurate. Now let me kind of take a step back and look at this difference about why some people disclose their mental models and some didn't. So what we did was we tried to understand what percentage of people of who described polders, how many disclose their mental models and didn't. So it was almost like an 80-20 relationship. 87% of respondents disclose their mental models but 75% of respondents did not disclose, the same respondents did not disclose their TIRM models. So we tried to understand if this varied according to where they were located on the river. Is it true that people who lived in the upstream regions of the river where most of the TIRM activities have taken place, is it true that people who live up there understand TIRM better than people who live downstream where no TIRM has taken place? In some ways, we find that this hypothesis holds that people who live around where TIRM was conducted that's where most people say they understand polders but if you move further downstream to the lower part of the river they don't really, they refuse to disclose what a TIRM is. Now, kind of try to understand two concepts here. One, if TIRM is a local concept then shouldn't people across the river the same river getting breached at multiple points, even downstream they should know what a polder is what a TIRM is but they don't and in downstream parts of the river there's another research there's another polder where TIRM is currently taking place and even respondents who kind of live near that region refuse to disclose what a TIRM is and our hypothesis is there our explanation for that is TIRM probably is a very disputed concept. Whenever TIRM has been conducted in the past, even the current one which is currently ongoing, it's always been characterized by dispute and it makes people very talking about it to strangers so because TIRM was so conflict reason they did not want to speak to researchers even a researcher like me from India who spoke Bengali or even my RAs who are from a local university who spoke Bengali and who looked and spoke like them, even with them they were probably not willing to disclose what a TIRM is, they're not willing to discuss for polders we didn't see any upstream downstream concept phenomena so polders people kind of either knew it irrespective of whether they were located it was other variables which were making an effect on the understanding of polders so to kind of probe deeper into this we ran regression analysis we ran out 25 models, this is too small to understand and I'll explain to you what we have done here, so what we did was try to understand these different concepts how they were associated with performance so is it true that statistically gender has an effect on model similarity or age or education access to authority and how does that effect understanding of performance and you know this other way the other context, what about context so in general what we found is first one, men understood polders better than women and this was this was quite stuck across our physiographic regions across our polders and we believe it's mainly because in a country like Bangladesh in the region where you're walking it's slightly conservative slightly patriarchal and most women probably are expected to do housework, they don't really go, they're not expected they probably walk in the farms they probably do go fishing, they need extreme survival needs but they expect it to be at home and therefore they're not so connected to the polder they don't really need to know polders and that probably affects understanding of polders, women in way don't feel connected to polders as much as men do. Again access to authority, we found that respondents who have spoken to researchers like us or people who have taken part in various conferences they understood polders better so access to authority people who worked in maintenance of polders, they understood polders better. So in general what we found is that in spite of the fact that the resident characteristics effect mental model similarity but while mental models are similar some cases, in lot of cases they are different and that was affecting performance and that was leading to misperformance of the polders and that is essentially what we are testing the theoretical framework and which is what our findings are I think I'll stop here I don't know how long I've taken I hope I'm within time and thank you for giving me the opportunity to present Thank you Sanjian and I'm very impressed by the rigor in your work there have been some questions already in the comment box on either YouTube or Facebook comments, please continue to share your comments their audience because we are collecting those and we will forward them later to Dr Sanjian myself I was very much wondering also when we are talking about different mental models of poldering and tidal river management what it then would mean for mental models of deep poldering so maybe we can talk about that later as well as in the Netherlands deep poldering is an issue maybe there is some understanding by some that tidal river management is also a form of deep poldering when you propose that as an innovative way to a more sustainable management of the poldered areas in Bangladesh but let's talk about that after our second presenter so thank you very much Sanjian I found it very interesting we will discuss further after our second speaker with that having been said our second speaker is already here on screen welcome Badrul Hasan it's very nice to have you with us and the topic of Badrul is a community management plus model for the governance of rural drinking water systems and he did a comparative case to young pond center filter systems in coastal Bangladesh Badrul is about completing his PhD he's going to defend it soon as I have understood so that's a very exciting moment in your academic career he was a PhD researcher at the NWO Urbanizing Deltas of the World Project Delta MAR which is about governance and hydrogeological prerequisites for sustainable water supply through MAR systems in urbanizing Deltas they applied that in Bangladesh and I'm quite sure that Badrul gives a little bit more of an explanation about it so as I mentioned currently Badrul is finishing his PhD at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his PhD topic was about the governance of rural drinking water systems in developing countries focusing on coastal Bangladesh which he's going to talk about more with us and in addition to that he's also an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh as I've understood he's in Dhaka currently and is sharing his knowledge and insights with us from Dhaka basically his areas of expertise include groundwater governance and common research management and institutional analysis and his complex mixture of knowledge he is going to share with us I see that his presentation is almost ready to go so thank you very much Badrul for being here with us I see we now need to move away from the presenters mode to the presentation mode and then I give the floor to you when you're ready it takes a little more time to get the presentation correct in the screen wait for that and let me then also continue to ask you to share your comments in the comment boxes and let me also for the people who are new in this master class series last week we had our first master class which was about sinking, shrinking and saltier deltas and via the links that are on our web page where we communicate about these master class series you can also go to the youtube videos that are recorded of this first master class and in which Dr. Philippe Minderhout and Dr. Saper Aslami had presented their work on the mikong delta in which they studied soil subsidence and soil intrusion you see that patrul is coming back in yes everything is there except for a video hope we can see patrul soon maybe patrul I hope you can hear me you might turn off your video because it appears that the connection where you are from is not supportive to us today otherwise let me go back to sanjayan because maybe we can have some questions already discussed with him sanjayan let us wait for patrul his connections to be fixed there has been a question in the comment box one on also the collection of your data and how you are selecting the different respondents you have mentioned something about the distance from people living from the rivers could you explain a little bit more because I think this person is very interested in how to do a representative sample for studying this I will just share my screen maybe you can just explain you can also get into support with Mr. Patrul let me stop sharing so I would like to respond to your question in three different ways because I am not sure exactly what sharyat ulal was asking me so what is the criteria for selecting 200 units as household so 250 units mainly we stopped so there were different kinds of stakeholders local respondents local politicians teachers different kinds of stakeholders for local respondents we stopped once saturation had been reached so if you remember when I showed you this river and you are traveling on different roads once we felt that kind of resaturation we stopped at the same time we hit the river in the slots of 5 kilometer distances so we first covered along the river for the first stretch then we went in land further in land and we are beginning to see there was not much variation people are saying very similar things we are not finding the kind of variation we would expect so for local respondents because we are doing face to face interviews traveling by bike on different roads we stopped once saturation had been reached we could have found variation we could have gone let's say at 2 kilometer stretch or 3 kilometer stretch and try to do more intensive interviews we didn't and like I said for TRM we did more interviews more stringent interviews more closely because we are not sure what was happening because so few people were talking about TRM now for local officials local politicians regional officials these interviews were conducted just before COVID was going to begin and after COVID began and therefore we did them over telephone and therefore here we stopped once we did not find any more people to interview once we called up as many BWD people in khunna, joshore, shatkhira whose numbers we could find LGED, BWD forest department, agricultural department a host of these departments and after sometime they stopped they would just not answer our calls we also spoke to the union parisian members we spoke to union parisian officials there and we follow the same strategy so the 250 number that you see out there is mainly saturation in terms of local respondents and availability 15% of our telephone interviews were successful 85 to 90% 80 to 90% of our respondent interviews were successful so that gives an idea of how we came up with that number and I don't know if I have answered mahmadulal's question I am not sure if he is still there but if he has further questions I hope you did what I find also interesting is that you showed two word clouds one of the mental models of your interviewees on folders and one of the mental models of your responses from your interviewees on tidal river management and in folders I think one of the largest words was flooding and in tidal river management it was sedimentation my understanding is that sedimentation only comes with flooding but my own mental model is when I hear flooding I see that as something negative and when I hear about sedimentation I understand that as something positive could you explain a little bit more is there also a positive or a negative connotation about either well, land management so in both you see flooding as a very important concept in folders mainly because people are saying folders protected us from flooding so it's an embankment which protects us from flooding so that's why we see flooding there and you see in tidal river management because there I think there's a muddling of concept people in some way or the other if they knew what a folder was they probably would say it's a bath in some ways they knew there was this embankment kind of thing which was there but they didn't know there would be a swiss gate there for them polda is either a road an embankment, a beribad or a vabda what about these drainage canals which flow from the swiss gate into the agricultural lands why aren't people talking about them there were a lot of these concepts which should be there they were not that's why I said the concepts are very simplistic a lot of people say road for connectivity embankment for flood protection road for planting trees they've seen forestry department people planting trees on the embankments which are used as roads so they say the trees are there and it protects us shade I don't know if the word shade or something like that is also there it may be just a minor term no that's probably not there but for TRM it's complete muddling so you should say breaching, breach closure you should say water coming in water going out, salinity intrusion and then some of the minor concepts should be this village protection dam and things like that actually my understanding there is that it depends on how the person has been affected this is something we didn't test if it's somebody who owns land out there and who's benefited from it if it's a rich farmer or a politically influential farmer you'd probably know what TRM is and you'd probably be willing to discuss it but if it's somebody who's been badly affected by it for him it's his land getting flooded it is land getting washed away or it's just sediment happening on his pond or it's just the shrimp mafia taking his land you know thank you that's why you see those differences it would be nice to discuss further when we have finished also recitation by Badru is to then also think further on what is that means for the development the sustainable development in Bangladesh in relation to the delta plan 2100 if it also actually proposes tidal river management and how that then relates to the mental models of the local government officials that then India needs to manage and implement those I see Badru is here with us again so I'm immediately turn the floor back to you and I cannot hear you to be frank Badru we cannot hear you maybe it's wise to unplug your headset so that maybe your laptop that you are using can use its internal microphone this is very unfortunate what's going on now because we still do not have sound from you Badru let's send you one more time back to our back support and to see if we can fix your sound together and maybe then Sanjayan so in relation to the question that I posed to you in how far the mental models of local government officials in relation to tidal river management as maybe also an influence on introducing this concept for sustainable development of the southwestern delta in Bangladesh I think we need to do a few more studies a lot of us field researchers when we go there we get introduced to people who probably are the local elite there and that kind of a perception to a large extent and also kind of try to understand what happens to people who are who move away from the site because once TNM happens the land gets submerged and they migrate a lot of the people who suffer badly are the people who migrated out to different parts of Bangladesh or maybe outside Bangladesh to speak to them when we hear their stories our perception of TNM probably changes I mean it's important that we focus I mean TNM is a very interesting concept living with nature ensuring that this fluids gets work ensuring that sanity does not enter the lands these are important considerations but if you look at I think this is technocratic versus local thing that we talk about I think it continues to affect even high level academics because I am not in Bangladesh right now but I think it is important to realize that not all local people are happy with things there with TRM polders it has given them huge benefit it has protected them from flooding and acknowledging it but they don't know what a polder is some of them are saying a polder is a ward a polder is mixing a hydrological concept with a political concept that shouldn't be happening so either you they don't even know that LGTD is the administrative public agency which is responsible for roads or that it also maintains its embankments there is a lot of confusion of course these are very poor people they may not be expected to know these things but what about union level local politicians or union level officials I think it's important to really understand that the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh how are they affected by shrimp farming this literature on aqua culture that's well available link it to TRM it's obvious to anybody who goes there that these salt water intrusion is destroying people's livelihood it's well documented and TRM in some ways also leads to it it leads to agricultural productivity vegetables grow but some things don't grow back I mean I've spoken to people some say these trees we haven't seen them in years in Bill Cookshire some will say yeah they come back some will say they're coming back also I think we should travel along this rivers upstream this lush green parts of Joshua and then we come down Kulna this rivers drying I think we really need to look at poor marginalized farmers in greater detail when we talk about TRM and see how it can be customized the way it's been proposed right now even you know you just get sanity into the lands helping shrimp farmers may increase GDP but it who benefits most from it I mean people still remain as poor as they were during independence GDP may have increased but most people are still very poor that's my only observation primary observation yeah thank you would you also think in relation to that same issue maybe that because tidal river management in one way is also a very traditional form of land management, land and water management in that area of that people regarded as well old-fashioned, non-development and that that would hinder so is there a need to rethink then also tidal river management as a way forward or more sustainable development of this area I think we need to understand that this this idea of breaching dams creating temporary dams before polders came in it's different from tidal river management the same conditions don't prevail anymore tidal river management the way we see it right now may have it can be theoretically and by argument back to this concept of people living in balance with nature before polarization it's not the same anymore when they were doing it we were not having sanity intrusion the way it's happening now stream farming was not there so if some people are saying you know tidal river management is a traditional concept I back to differ and I'm willing to stand my ground I may be saying something which may not be acceptable but that's what it is it's not the same it's linked the origins may be similar so how do you go back to that pre polder tanks you know this rivers first of all most of them are covered with mud it's in really side a lot of these rivers polders have come up you cannot remove them completely and if you create TNM like holes out there breach them then why are the squeeze gates working it's the same thing a squeeze gate is a breach which is more systematically operated if squeeze gates don't operate TNM how is that different in creating a hole out there and letting water come in and go make the squeeze gates operate make them operational is my argument so I think we are calling TNM as a long-term solution the way it's being done and trying to link it back to Aasthamashi vatwala concept I think is wrong in my opinion I don't know if that's what others would say but we need to distinguish between them yes and we of course very much appreciate your expert opinion um I'm looking a little bit now at the private chat that we have here in our in the back room and wondering if Badrul is ready to get back in and let us wait for a second I hear no then because I see well I get the message that his connection is just a lost again which is of course a very pitiful especially for the people who have been looking forward to hearing his research work and as mentioned by Laura in the comment box that is well one of the luxury steps one have with a good internet connection what we are going to do is that we are going to fall back to a backup is that we are going to record Mr. Badrul his presentation and that we are going to share that later online because there there is not sufficient time anymore as well in this master class to stream it live which is very unfortunate and with that then being said I have a final question then for Dr. Shantjean before we are moving forward so from the past years of research that you have done what is your main message that you would like to put forward to our community of delta practitioners and managers to move in relation to this idea of complex thinking how human and water systems relate and interact together or moving towards a sustainable development of them based on your research what is your main message to our community what I am going to say might sound like a very simple message but I think we need to start focusing more on the social you know sure a polder, an embankment, a TRM these are all technological, technical hydrological concepts but I think we are ignoring the local a lot the local people, the poorest of the people just talking to technocrats local leaders local academics out there does not solve a problem we should do more research with the poorest of the poor people who live in the Shanties who live right next to the TRM sites who hunt for small pieces of fish if you go there on the sites early morning those are the people you should really talk to because the majority in spite of Bangladesh having developed a lot I think there is a lot of people out there who are really poor and if you are talking about sustainable development development for the poor public policy it is those people who matter because the rich people who leave the country they will move to India they will move to the US to UK it is the poor people who are going to get covered and they will move to the US sooner or later when climate change really takes place that is my message sorry for sounding very simple but thank you I think a fair message in relation and there might be an interesting connection and again with how you showed that there are various mental models among the various stakeholders in these systems in relation to participatory planning and development to take a variety of stakeholders on board in participatory developing and formulating these kinds of development plans and to be aware of the variety of understandings and perceptions of people on the delta itself or the polder itself but also of course on the problems and the solutions that can be proposed for a sustainable development thank you very much let me also take already thank you thank you but the rule for trying and that it has been very unfortunate that his connection got lost but we as mentioned we will record his presentation and we are going to share that online on our YouTube channel and also on our website where we promote this masterclass series that brings us me to closing then this masterclass and I'm going to invite you to join us again next week and next week masterclass in masterclass 3 and the topic is on adapting and innovating for managing developing deltas and we have then invited two speakers again just like today and next week and may I ask the back office to share my screen so people can see next week on Wednesday 29 September we have Uma Kulsem who did her PhD for the TU Delft University and she will be talking about adaptive delta management with a systematic exploration of community life lewd adaptation as uncertainty so she further explores the concept of adaptive management and we have Dr. Forti Minh Hoang of Wageningen University and her topic is on the role of innovation in the Vietnamese delta planning processes so next week we are going to look into the Bangladesh delta and the Vietnam Mekong delta with these two very smart women thank you very much for joining apologies for the technical errors that have occurred with us today nevertheless we will record Mr. Badrul his presentation so that we can share that with you we are looking forward to seeing you again next week in our third master class on adapting and innovating for managing and developing deltas thank you very much and looking forward to see you again