 Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening and welcome to the urbanizing deltas of the world online masterclass series masterclass and number four. In our online masterclass series, the state of the art of water research in South and Southeast Asia PhDs and postdoc researchers from various projects of the NWO urbanizing deltas of the world program are presenting their research work with you. Today's title of the masterclass is rethinking and delta knowledge and moving forward. And this is our fourth masterclass and also final masterclass of this series. Today, our schedule is a slightly different than in our previous masterclasses. Again, we do have two speakers who are Dr. Ruknu Ferdus and Dr. Shannur Hassan. Dr. Ruknu Ferdus will first give his presentation of about 30 minutes. And just like in the previous masterclasses, you are able to put your comments and questions in the comment boxes, either on YouTube or Facebook, whatever platform you are joining us. However, because Ferdus also needs to leave a little bit earlier, we plan his question and answer session immediately after his presentation. So the schedule is that first Ruknu gives his presentation of about 30 minutes, then we will have a Q&A session of a little bit more than five minutes. That will be followed by the presentation of Dr. Shannur Hassan and then we continue with a Q&A session after her presentation of about 30 minutes. So please, if you have questions and comments to Dr. Ruknu, please put them as soon as possible in the comment boxes. So we can address them to you in his Q&A session after his presentation. So let me immediately continue to introduce you to Dr. Ruknu Ferdus, who has already joined us here on screen. The topic of his presentation is living with floods in the Jammuna floodplain in Bangladesh and fight or flight. Ruknu was a PhD researcher in the NWO Organizing Deltas of the World Project Hydrosocial Deltas and he is an expert on the interaction between a human and water system. He has had more than 10 years of work experience in hydrology, social hydrology, where he studies the interaction between human and water systems, river morphology and water resources management. He has also experienced a flood risk assessment, early warnings, vulnerability studies and vulnerability analysis for climate change induced by sea level rise. He has been looking at community-based adaptation to climate change and community risk reduction programs. So a very knowledgeable person, if you would ask me and therefore we are very happy that you are joining us here. So with that having said, the floor is yours and I'm very much looking forward to your presentation. Thank you Dr. Ruknu Ferdus, thank you for your nice words for me. Now I want to share my screen. So can you see the screen? Hello, can you see the screen? I'm sorry. Yes, we can see your screen. Okay, now I can continue. I want to speak about living with class in Bangladesh, fight or flight. Because we know Bangladesh is one of the largest delta in the world and here the rivers are very dynamic and people are living in the flood plains. So my focus of my work is to understand the human flood interactions in Jumuna flood plain in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a hugely densely populated country. Most of the people are living in the flood plains, about 80%. And for my research, I used a sociological approach to describe human flood interaction. I will go on to general theory introduced by Debalda Saray in 2013. Debalda Saray's general theory was in a flood plain if there is no levee or no embankment then people are staying away from the flood plain. But if there is an embankment, then people are living closer to the embankment. This is the theory of Debalda Saray. So I'm using this theory in my research. So in my screen you can see there is a map of this Bengal delta in Bangladesh. And you can see this is the map of 1776, very old map. And in this map you can see there is a river, the blue line. This is called Bohaputra river. Earlier the Bohaputra river was following in this course in 1776. And if you see that you can point out in my screen there is a small channel which is called Jainain. It was flowing from the Jumuna river. So if I go to the next map in 1840, the Asin's map, you can see that the Bohaputra river has two course now. One major course one is in the left one was old Bohaputra and the state one is Jumuna which we are calling now in Jumuna river. Actually it happened because of the earthquake in Assam in 1840. There is a huge earthquake in Assam and because of that the river of course has diverted. So from the small tiny river to a big river, there is a huge impact on the people at that time who are living in that area. So if we see the map of 1943, then we can see that the present Jumuna river which has enlarged and the old Bohaputra has become a very tiny river. So now the present Jumuna river it becomes, sorry, it becomes, it is 12 to 16 kilometers and it is a bedded river. There are lots of people living inside also the river. We are called River Island. In Bengali we are called Chor. So people are living both flat plains, right bank and left bank and also inside the river. So before going to my presentation I want to like to show you flooding in Bangladesh. You can see this is an example of flooding and you can see the people are shifting their house because of flooding. They are shifting their houses from one place to another place and now I want to show you another video of erosion. So you can see that during the flood people are moving their houses temporarily, which houses are under the water. And also because of the flooding there is huge river erosion in the river, Jumuna river and the houses beside the river they are going inside the river. So it is very devastating for the people who are living who are affected due to river erosion. And now I want to show one example of human response to river dynamics because this river is very dynamic. Jumuna river is very dynamic and I already told you that its width average width is 12 to 16 kilometers. And I am showing a satellite image of 1978. This is only a small portion. You can see the map is only 5 kilometers width inside the river. And if I describe the map you can see the blue colors. These are the water and the red colors which are a settlement or agriculture field. People are living there or crop field and the white ones are the river island sand. People are not living there. This is the sand. I am going to tell you a story of Mr. Abdul Baqi Khan who was living in Bajitel Kuppi in 1978. And you can see that beside his house there was a channel of Jumuna river and in 1980 his house was eroded. The video I showed just like that way his house was eroded in river bank erosion in 1980. And he had to move another place which is called Khuzlupur in Khuzlupur. It is almost 5 kilometers far from his old house. So like this way you can see that every year in 1983 the river course has changed. It has changed in the Jumuna and his house again underwater and he had to move again. So every time the river is changing and his house is underwater and he is moving from one place to another place. In his entire life he has moved 11 times and every time he lost his house and every time he has to build a new house and he has agriculture lands and all agriculture land has eroded in the river bank erosion. Now in 2016 when I was interviewing him he came back to Kabul, Union because he was living there till 2008. And when I was interviewing him at that time it was 2016. It was still 8 years. It was a huge time for him to stay in one place. But in 2018 when I called him again over phone where is he now? He told me that he has moved to another place because in Kabul his house is already underwater. So this is one example of Mr. Abdelbakhi Khan whose life, whose response, his activities is governed by the river. And because he, I already mentioned that Bangladesh is a hugely and densely populated country and it is not easy to move far away. And if you go other places it's also not easy to find a new place because every flood occurrence, every flood event or erosion event he has lots of damages and it is not very easy to recover. Most of the people who cannot recover from this river bank erosion damages. This is one of the examples I showed here how like Mr. Abdelbakhi Khan there are lots of people. Thousands of people are living in the Jamuna river flood plain and also inside the Chor river island area. So my case study area was, I took both left bank and right bank and also inside the river in Jamuna river. My case study was about 500 kilometer and people is only 700 people are living per kilometer which is lower than the national population people living in 1 kilometer. In my research I use both primary data and secondary data. Primarily I use Haagul survey and Pogazga discussions to collect their past flood histories, river bank erosion histories, their income, occupations, migration, everything I try to collect from them. And then I also cover this primary data with secondary data like river system, river dynamics and also flooding events. Also I use the secondary data and correlate both primary and secondary data and try to find and do my research. In my research I have proposed a new concept, socio-hydrological space along the Jamuna river. Because when I see, when I was doing my field work I found that because of the difference in the geography of that area, there are existence of different socio-hydrological spaces. If I explain that in the Jamuna river, 1960s the government build an embankment in the right bank. But they did not build any embankment on the left bank. The left bank is only on the natural levee and the right bank is protected by river bank erosion. People are also living in the middle of the river in the Chaur area. In my figure you can see that the right bank is actually showing in the left. It is protected and people are living there in the red. And there are three geographic area. So based on this graph, based on this figure, we make a definition of socio-hydrological space. It is an area with distinct hydrological and social features that give rise to the emergence of distinct socio-hydrological dynamics. It explains the especially distinct dynamics of the human flood system in the Jamuna flood plain in Bangladesh. And after that, we tried to prove that our concept, there is evidence of our concept. So the proof is that when we analyze the source of flooding or flood occurrence, we found that in three spaces there are different sources of flooding is different. And also flood occurrence in the protected area, the flood occurrence is less. But different because in the middle area, the flood occurrence is high. Every year they are facing flooding. But interestingly, the area which is protected by flood embankment, and we found that there is another river flowing right to the protected area. They are also getting flood from that river. But also because of this three different geographic, for different spaces, there are ever as damage in floodings and also different. I will also try to see the erosion and erosion was different. The erosion is high in the chore area. And the second is following, but second is the left area. And ever as the area which is protected by embankment, there ever as well as an income is high compared to the other areas. And if you see the migration in the chore area, they are migrating. But the most interesting thing is they are migrating within the chore areas. They are not going to in the protected area or in the natural flood plain area. So when I was asking them why you are not going to other areas, the answer was that first they don't want to go far from their origin. They are just moving around their origin place. They try to stay as close as their origin. And because I know second option is it is very costly to find a place in the protected area. We also see that the farmer, because in Bangladesh there are different categories of farm, because 80% people are farmers in Bangladesh. And we have different categories, large farmer, medium farmer and small farmer, landlady, merchant farmer. So we see that the farmer ratio was also different in different places. And during the course of the time, it is also changing. And it depends on the flooding and the permanent duration. And obviously in the protected area, we also see that the population density is much higher than the other two areas. And by the course of the time, I took the last population census 2011 and I found that the increased rate of population is much higher in protected area than the other two areas. So social activities, economic activities, everything is different in protected areas than the other two areas and also they are different. So from here we can see that there is evidence of social and physical spaces. And because of these differences, their hydrological processes are also different and social processes are also different. So what are they doing? Are they copying or adapting? I already mentioned that most of the people, because of the flooding, they don't want to move from their origin. They temporarily go back and come back again after the flood. But due to erosion, they have nothing to do but they have to leave the original place but they are moving very close. So when I was trying to find either they were copying or adapting and I found that their mechanism, though in Bangladesh we are telling that they are adapting but in my research I found that they are not actually adapting because copying, what is the meaning of copying and adapting? Coping is we just adjust our present situation and that's it. And adapting, it means we adjust and also improve our life. But in my study area, I see that their life is not improving. They are just adjusting with their current situation. And the large farmer, I can see that many people have changes from large farmers to landlifes in the last 40-50 years. You can see that there is an average land loss per household. We also mentioned the socio-economic class we derived from based on their wealth and income. And we see that most of the poor people, they have lost most of the agricultural lands or household lands because many, many poor people who are now poor, once in a time they are rich. So by the course of time they become poor. And when we were talking about recovering from the flooding or reverberation then we found that they can recover from flooding because from the time the Bangladesh people know how to fight, how to live with floods so they prepare themselves before flooding. So only due to flooding their damages are very low but due to reverberation their damage is very high because when their land is going to the river or their house is going to the river it is impossible to recover. And I found that more than about 80% people they could not recover their flood losses. And by this time every erosion event they are losing and they become poorer and they are losing their strength to fight again in the next year. Next coming event. But on the other hand we see that if we see the flood fatalities in Bangladesh and I have data from 74 and I found that the flood catalyst is decreasing over time. It is a good sign because earlier most of the people are because they know how to live with flood so the flood catalyst is decreasing over time. And for that we made a hypothetical trajectory for socio-economic growth and I found that if you see that the black and dotted line it is if you do not do nothing then it is a trajectory line, the black and dotted line and if we do no adjustment then one flooding or erosion event will just go down and every year we are decreasing our economic growth. But if we do some coping or adjustment then our line is almost parallel to, it is almost stable. But if we can do adaptation then the green line then it rises very high. But in my study area I found that when I analyzed the economic condition I found that they have become poorer to poorer. In Bangladesh the overall GDP is increasing but in my study area the people annual income is decreasing. So it means they are not adapting, they are doing either no adjustment or they are doing just coping. So in conclusion I found that there are different socio-economic spaces that exist in the Gemini river. People, if we use the socio-economic space we can do the interaction, even interaction easily. And this space is also not fixed. It is shifting because of highly dynamic hydrological and human systems. The river is also very dynamic. And I found that there is a coexistence of living with floods and fighting with floods because in one place people are fighting with embankments. They are building groynes and rivetments. But in the other hand also people living in the chore areas and with the production areas. Although there is a flood almost every year people do not move from their original place. And if there is a temporary movement occurring they come back to their previous place. Now overall people are getting poorer and therefore less able to make their further adjustment for the next flooding event. Thank you very much for listening. If you have any questions then you can ask me. Yes, thank you Ferdus. Thank you for your very interesting presentation. And as mentioned I would like to share some questions with you. And I also still invite also the people that have been joining us online to still continue to put your questions or remarks in the comment boxes. I think you showed some very interesting results of your research. And one of them relates of course also to how you mentioned is this coping or is this adapting? I see that in Dutch Bangladesh relations often also at higher level there is spoken about how the Dutch can also learn from the resilience of the Bangladesh communities. And you mentioned well is this coping or adapting? And in your case areas you actually say well this is also a lot of coping and people are actually in some sort of a poverty trap in these areas. So a question is how can we then actually move from coping to adapting? Maybe that's a first question. And next to that this is of course then also because you also mentioned overall GDP of Bangladesh is growing. Yet these people living in these areas are lagging behind in also economically developing. So it hints us that there is an increasing gap between the urban and the rural maybe or just a bigger deviation between the rich and the poor. So this is then also a national issue. Well how can national policy then contribute to that these people also go from coping to adapting and are also joining the general economic growth? Do you have ideas about it? Thank you for your question here. Julie we have a confusion about the definition of coping and adapting because what we are doing in Bangladesh we are telling we are adapting. We are telling that Bangladesh is adapting and adapting to flooding. Yeah we are adapting but in my state area I see that people are not adapting they are actually coping. In my definition I see that because if you adapt what I understand adapting I adapt the situation and I improve my lifestyle. Actually it is not happening in that area. So in Bangladesh from my experience I can say we cannot alone live with floods we cannot alone fight with floods we have to do both. We have to do both fight and also leave because we can see that for fighting it is not possible from the local people. That should be the government initiative because in my study area I saw that in the charity or in the left hand where there is no impact man and people try to collect money from themselves and try to build bundles bundles which is one kind of spark one kind of one kind of groin made of bamboo locally available bamboo. So it is very normal structure. So they try to divert the flow of Jamuna river during the moonshine but these bundles are very bundles distance is very low depending comparing with the strength of the river. So it is washed away immediately. So to make a stable bank to make a government initiative to make an impact man or river bank protection work but at the same time we have to do the intelligent way because we cannot change the whole river it is a very mighty and big river so we need to find a way which portion will change which portion will not we have to do that intelligently and also during my study I found that people's memory is very low so people forget things very easily so what happened last year or maybe five years ago they forget things very easily so we have to we have to do more awareness or training sessions with the local people and also we need to learn from the local people because we know there are lots of knowledge within the local people so we have to increase the interaction between the people from the expert and also the local people and I think we need to innovate some adaptation policies for them how can we they already have some adaptation because people are changing their coping pattern depending on their depending on on their because people has changed changing their coping pattern in the field so because of flooding so they are innovating new variety if the flood season is changing there is innovating new variety so there is obviously there is adaptation I'm not telling that there is no no at all I am not telling that there is no there is adaptation there is adaptation they are new variety of crops they have they are shifting to one variety another variety so there is adaptation but I am telling about the coping means they are most of the people who has who have become landless whose house is eroded by land they have actually nothing to do so they are only adjusting their life adjusting that they are moving from one place to another place one farmer is he has lost his land he is becoming a maybe a laborer day laborer so he just adjust adjusting his life there is nothing for him to do adaptation so also land is limited so we cannot provide him another land so this is the thing we have to think about and we have to do more research how can we overcome this situation and if you allow me I can see some question here will I answer them here or yes I think there was an interesting question and it relates I think to also how you are theoretically addressing this issue and you address it as from a social hydrological perspective and so the policy recommendations that are asked for by one of the participants is would those policy recommendations be either addressed more to the hydrology and the engineering or should it be addressed more to the social economic situation of these people I think both I think both alone alone we cannot do anything earlier practice was that all the decisions were for flood management was taken by the engineers or policy makers but I think we have to work together that's why I mentioned earlier in my previous question that there are lots of knowledge within the society so everybody should jointly do the research and I think when I was doing my work in my field I learned lots of new things from the local people so they know more than us for the locality or for the river because they are living beside the river for long time and they are inheriting the knowledge from their previous generation so I think all local people, sociologists, economists or engineers, hydrologists all work together as a team it is called integrated research management so by this way I think we can overcome this problem. Thank you. With your research and especially also the story of Mr. Abdul very well presents is the issue of climate migration so we are expecting due to sea level rise and changing water patterns that people will move from one location to another we see that people also on the local level and often this story is often portrayed at a much larger scale but we see of course also Mr. Abdul being a migrant in his own locality moving from one place to another but he might also be in competition then with other people moving to one place and to another place where maybe also other people are already living and have you seen how that might also relate in conflict or are people actually very cooperative in creating new communities together? Yeah the good thing is they are very much cooperative because the people who are living in the rural area and in that region they know that they know the miseries so they are very cooperative when I was doing my field research in that area I found that people are whose house is gone by the developing erosion normally for first they choose where to go their motivation their choice was to stay closer because when one land is eroded by flooding then which is the land is inside the river it is the government property the rule says so but if within 25 years the river is very dynamic so if within 25 years the land is again from the river so then the original owner can get back the land so that's why that's why people always want to stay very closer to their origin and origin and when they move to other place normally if another place who have land they some with some small amount of money they allow them to stay there they build temporary houses and I also found there are many people who have nothing to pay they are staying free so I saw that there are cooperation between them and also during the flood I also showed a flood video that people are moving their houses so maybe this is one person's house but there are 5 or 10 persons helping him so during the flood season they are helping one each other free there are no cost they are just jumping to help other people so it is a very good sign in the society that people are helping each other yeah yeah so thank you and what you actually also now basically mean to say is that Mr Abdul is actually representing also a community so that the community is moving rather than just one person but of course this is highlighting your story there is a question maybe that relates to that from one of the participants that is after the flood action plan in 2000 was there no baseline study regarding all the resettlements which were established partly as a consequence of new embankments made under the flood action plan are you aware of such you are flood action plan yeah and a baseline study regarding the resettlements so I think this relates to the knowledge about how many people have resettled after actually I have no idea how many people resettled but in Bangladesh flood action plan Bangladesh government has taken some they build some villages which is called butchgram in Bangladesh it is called butchgram so government has already the new chart every year we found some new island maybe one old island has eroded and new island raised from inside the river so what government did which which island is almost 2 3 or 5 years older government and put raised the island and island with some sand and they built some houses for the people who has who lost their houses in the urban erosion or in the flooding so I saw there are lots of this type of villages in the chore area or in the flattening area created by the government also help with the help with there are lots of NGO local NGOs there supporting the government also sometimes foreign resources coming from the other countries to helping Bangladesh government I saw that it is very good initiative by the government within the flood plan flood action plan and then final question before we move to our second speaker so do you think that as you mentioned that local people and local communities do have a lot of knowledge they are also able to collectively create some resources to well either cope or adjust their activities but do you do you feel that these local people are enough represented in formal policy making and that their local knowledge is used to well for the ambition actually to go towards adaptation rather than continuous coping I think there are lots of scope to collect knowledge from the local people but I am afraid that during the policy making I am afraid that they are not taking care properly I think so we should include them also in policy making not policy making I will use their knowledge in policy making and actually there are lots of researches that are going on in Bangladesh and there are lots of issues also working with flooding and reviving erosion but most of the reports most of the findings are stored in their own pocket it is not going to the policy level I think so obviously they are going something but I think the share is very low than the amount of the knowledge and also there are some political reason also they have something political reason so all together I think we should explore more because there are lots of local NGOs who are working with flooding and reviving erosion in Bangladesh in the Jomuna flat plain area also other rivers but though they are they are small NGOs they are just doing a report and they are helping people and the report is just within them so we should also contact with the local NGOs who are working with flooding and reviving erosion and we also arrange that there is a government body which is called disaster management Upojela disaster management committee every Upojela so but in that committee there are lots of people from the government also from the local community and they are also sometimes they are also helping the NGOs but I think there should be a proper proper coordination between them between the local people, between the researchers between the also the NGOs there is a proper coordination then we should make we can make a good policy I think so in future I think there is a lack of coordination I think so there is a good challenge to continue to work on I am going to thank you very much Ferdous for your very interesting presentation and also for your deeper insights in this Q&A part of this master class thank you very much I of course recommend everybody who is now joining us online to go to your favorite search engine on the internet and look for Ferdous his PHD thesis and his other academic works because they are definitely worth it to read and study so again thank you very much for your participation and as mentioned you need to leave because you have other commitments also to do so thank you for your time it was very nice to have you here and I am looking forward to seeing you soon in the future thank you and that brings us to the second speaker of this master class and our second speaker is Dr. Shanuar Hassan and her topic for today's presentation is knowing Deltas from Perspectives of Knowledge Transfer in Development Cooperation Shanuar was a PhD researcher in the NWO Urbanizing Deltas of the World Project Strengthening Strategic Delta Planning Processes in Bangladesh, the Netherlands, Vietnam and beyond and in her PhD she explored different ways to conceptualize and think and rethink about policy transfers in particularly the Dutch Delta approach in international cooperation contact so from the Netherlands to Bangladesh and Vietnam she studied this critically and resulted in a very interesting PhD thesis I can say also proudly say because I was the co-promoter of her work and in that work she has studied the policy transfer as a transfer of translation and in her thesis she experiments with telling the story of the transfer of the Dutch Delta approach to Bangladesh and Vietnam as a translation rather than a transfer and this has paved the way for reimagining policy transfers as symmetrical conversations a conversation which there are many knowers and they are dialoguing and learning to co-develop policies with that being said Shanur then I give the floor to you to start your presentation to it yes you are back sorry I lost you indeed right on the moment you know thanks for the introduction I missed some of your at the end of your introduction so I assume that the floor is given to me now and bear with me for a few moments while I start the presentation and go through this technicalities so to begin with as I have introduced that my topic is to my doctoral research was on policy transfer with the focus on the transfer of Dutch Delta knowledge and in that I kind of came up with a way forward to know Deltas a bit differently so I call it my presentation topic is to know Deltas so let's see how can we know Deltas and I would like to focus on discussing what is a dominant way of knowing and managing Deltas in the context of develop incorporation to be precise in the Dutch develop incorporation what is the impact of knowing Deltas in the conventional way that the Dutch government promotes and what can be an alternative way of knowing the Deltas so to begin with I would like to draw your attention and the speeches excerpts of speeches that I came across throughout my research nobody knows the Delta management better than the Dutch Dutch water professionals who are working to promote the safe and resilient futures across the world from Bangladesh to New York and from Jakarta to Yangtze Delta in China the Netherlands are the responsibility to place our knowledge and expertise to at the service of less vigorous countries but also to create economic opportunities for our water sector so when you look if someone is trying to learn about Deltas he or she may get an impression that the Dutch knows best as the former Prime Minister expresses and the other countries outside of the Netherlands relies on Dutch knowledge and expertise and they are kind of like an empty vessel when it comes to not manage their own Deltas and the Dutch top government officials and water when they go out travels outside of the Netherlands they try to emphasize on creating a sameness between the Deltas they are traveling to and the Deltas in the Netherlands so when in Colombia the Dutch top government officials emphasize on the differences in terms of the altitude the countries are located at but the similarities are many, most importantly on water and also when in Vietnam the most logical thing that the Dutch government officials could think of when it comes to water partnership is to do development in Deltas using the Dutch Deltas knowledge why? because the Deltas region Mekong Deltas region in Vietnam and the entire country of the Netherlands are densely populated with a similar size and population and also the Dutch policy documents emphasize that different countries for example in this case Bangladesh needs an integrated approach to secure water safety and food security and in these speeches they indicate about kind of like a must haveness of Dutch Deltas knowledge to manage Deltas outside of the world and in line with these codes the Dutch government promotes a narrative for a solution that they promote as a must have policy solution for sustainable Deltas management for all Deltas in the world they call it Dutch Deltas approach so and why they justify why all the Deltas irrespective of their differences in terms of nature geography morphology and the socio-economic conditions why they need a one common solution because the preconditions for a sustainable and integrated Deltas approach are the same as the Dutch government focuses so what is this Dutch Deltas approach there is no widely accepted definition what the Dutch Deltas approach is the Dutch government uses the term to promote a package of 12 planning exercises that they used or that they have been using in the Dutch Deltas program they call it building blocks for sustainable Deltas management so for all Deltas across the world you can see this is a bit vague although in resolution that these are the 12 plastered planning exercises that a Deltas country must have as a policy option to manage their Deltas and surprisingly here I would like to share an anecdote that at the end of my during my research I came across a situation where I couldn't find this illustration of Dutch Deltas approach in the Dutch websites anymore because there was, there have been a growing criticism and I will share a bit reflection on this a bit later so now the question comes why this approach is promoted as a must-have solution for Deltas management it has to do with the Dutch aid to trade policy in developing cooperation the Dutch government created their development cooperation policy and they name it aid to trade policy it kind of if you can recall the policy the excerpts of a policy document that I just showed that says that the Dutch has a responsibility to develop the Deltas outside of the Netherlands in development cooperation out of solidarity and also at the same time to create for the Dutch water sector so these two aspects kind of sum up what the Dutch aid to trade policy is so I was mentioning about the growing criticism so this way of comparing all the Deltas as same and promoting and actively transferring one policy solution has been under criticism in practice and in research scholars call it a new colonial and new liberal approach some compares it to opportunistic reframing to export Dutch water and Delta knowledge and expertise and some also compares the efforts of Dutch government to export the Dutch Delta approach with global water salesmanship on rising water and climate change so the Dutch government also uses some promotional slogans like bring in the Dutch and the growing criticism kind of marred that the highlight of that slogan when people come up with a counter slogan called teaching the Dutch or should we teach the Dutch so when I did an analysis of this promotional narrative what I found is that in the promotional accounts Dutch government explains the mobility of the transfer of the Dutch Delta approach on its excellence and uniqueness of Dutch knowledge the narrative suggests that the expertise travels almost spontaneously because of its intrinsic qualities and there has been a great demand from other countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam Indonesia for Dutch Delta knowledge interestingly in this narrative what remains outside of the focus is the analysis of the Delta planning expert is itself and that what is transferred that is the Dutch Delta approach so I decided to follow an actor-centric approach inspired by STS Science and Technology Studies of Latourist Acton Network Theory I identified all those people who were actively involved in making of Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 and the Mekong Delta Plan in Bangladesh and Vietnam and I tried to know about their perceptions, how did they develop the Delta Plan what were their experiences what and who helped them or not and these are the topic I found that these are the topics something they don't openly discuss in public and I focus on actors and their actions not to damage any reputations for any individual or for any country or any governmental efforts but I was kind of perplexed when I came across all the difficult work in terms of diplomatic actions and then the convincing political maneuvering all these actors do to make a Delta Plan outside of the Netherlands which the most formal accounts in this case the promotional narrative of Dutch Government remains completely silent about so my respect and admiration for those people who work for making the transfer happen or making a Delta Plan develop outside of the Netherlands actually grew over the time I find it more important to draw attention to what they are doing behind the scenes which is not formally recognized in the promotional narrative of the transfer of Dutch Delta knowledge and I also find it important that if we consider the experiences of the involved actors which has then we can initiate a dialogue that would create better understanding of the role and the impact of the Dutch Delta approach and perhaps we can find a discuss way forward so moving on the major insight of the research that I carried out was that the dominant narrative of the Dutch Delta approach that the Dutch Government adherently promotes misrepresents its transfer to capture what happens in the transfer of the Dutch Delta approach I used a metaphor that is also the title of my doctoral research making waves I find the process of transfer similar or resembles to a series of waves just like waves do not propagate themselves but are consciously created and require continuous energy to keep spreading the efforts and actions of the actors in making a Delta Plan outside of the Netherlands were like that and some waves may decline or die together while others amplify sometimes unexpected ways it also matches with the actions and activities that the involved actors did in Vietnam and Bangladesh here I would highlight today three major insights reflecting on the process and the work and the knowledge the Delta knowledge itself what I found in my research that the Dutch Delta approach does not travel on its own nor on its inherent qualities it kind of opposes or challenges what the Dutch Government promotes a demand for the Dutch Delta approach is created there is not a huge demand from the so called recipient countries but the Dutch Government actively have to create a demand for it in their selected long term strategic bilateral partner countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mozambique and Vietnam so in a nutshell this transfer does not happen in a wide space but in an arena that is already established and built on diplomatic and trade relations here you can might become curious to know then what is the motivation for the recipient countries to align with the Dutch in this transfer to reflect I would like to use a quote of Bangladeshi export on climate he told me that we do not need a Delta plan here we need reference to Bangladesh and it happened in Bangladesh this development of Delta plan because the Dutch has diplomatically pushed for it now it does have some benefits because having a plan helps to focus on development of the Delta area which is vulnerable to climate change one of the most vulnerable Delta's in the world and this also helps to attract donors for example World Bank and ADB who needs different mechanisms to invest so it kind of work as an umbrella of pulling in different issues and different actors so that kind of partly explains the motivation of the countries who are so called the recipient countries so what work goes into making this transfer happen what I found that much of the work that the involved actors do largely consists of creating alliances and political buy-in rather than something being very technical as the Dutch promotional narrative highlights and they do it often by mobilizing or building on existing diplomatic and trade relations and the work entails cautious navigation of cultural and power differences which involves again negotiation persuasions and contestations with other actors so in the process the recipient side in my research it was Vietnam and Bangladesh creatively molds and importantly steers the process to make what is transferred to their interests and their own development context the third insight that I would like to draw attention to is the Dutch Delta knowledge what I found is that the Dutch Delta approach is far from those 12 fixed clustered building blocks it's not a fixed policy object of transfer rather it's a shape shifting object it's contents and shape change depends depending on when where and in which context and also by whom it is talked about refer to or enacted and the meaning of what Delta planning is changes almost beyond recognition once the Delta approach lands in a new destination I would show you in a while how it changes its meaning differently in Vietnam and in Bangladesh in comparison with that in the Netherlands so what emerges a Delta plan outside of the Netherlands is broad enough to fit a wide range of interests and accommodate different storylines of development and development visions so just to give an example with in the two in the illustration of the Dutch Delta approaches there is this one building block is a scenario development in the Netherlands in the Dutch Delta program the scenario development is used as a planning approach or a tool to come up with four uncertain uncertain futures and these futures uncertainties are projected based on two external drivers social economic development and climate change and then the robustness of the proposed planning strategies are assessed in accordance with the four uncertainties so when these scenarios were applied in the Mekong Delta plan it didn't work well in the context of the situation in Vietnam and also the situation the Mekong Delta is the socioeconomic situation of the Mekong Delta so what the actors Dutch and a group of Vietnamese experts did they came up with one uncertain futures to develop plan with instead of four and they proposed an agribusiness industrialization vision for the Mekong Delta plan which kind of challenges the Vietnam government's triple rise policy in Vietnam the government promotes and adheres their triple rise policy which says that the farmers in the Mekong Delta has to grow three rice crops a year and in that way the Delta becomes a rice bowl for the entire country and in the development index in spite of such high economic contributions the Mekong Delta region kind of lags behind in the least of development index then the other regions so in that way you can say it's a deprived region so the scenarios in the Mekong Delta plan does here it kind of challenges that politically ambition strategy of triple rise and it recommends that the Mekong Delta should develop into a specialized hub for high value agricultural products for export and domestic markets so it shouldn't be only rice but lotus and shrimp and other crops should also be cultivated and also it suggests not to go for the big infrastructure but for nature based solutions in accordance with the agro-based industrialization vision what happened in Bangladesh is that first the experts try to implement the conventional way of developing scenario as it is in the Dutch Delta program but then the experts and the government officials in Bangladesh they were kind of perplexed to see how it can fit the development context and the visions of Bangladesh because having only two external drivers of socio-economic conditions and climate change doesn't work because the countries have other external drivers that can influence its futures which includes the trans-boundary water relations and the political instability etc etc so then it went through several phases of changes so from four scenarios it was kind of like the experts kind of tried to fit into six but at the end what the scenario in Bangladesh Delta plan became is referred to as policy options developed by a group of macroeconomists Bangladesh macroeconomists so what they say that the scenario concept in the Dutch Delta program doesn't work in the context of development for Bangladesh what would work better in the case of Bangladesh is that having two projected uncertainties or two scenarios one is without a Delta plan that means business as usual so what is the consequences of it they analyze and now the scenario is having a Delta plan with a Delta plan so then they projected socio-economic conditions and they tried to show those projected outcomes how it contributes to Bangladesh governments prioritized development vision which is known as vision 2021 which is all about making the country upward in the development index and making it as a upper middle income country by 2041 and a lower middle income country by 2021 which Bangladesh has become according to the UN certified development indexes so at the end when the Dutch government promotes a Delta plan and transfers the Dutch Delta approach for dealing with water and climate in Vietnam a Delta plan became a vision of an agribusiness industrialization which emerged as a provocative and agent setting plan which focuses on well-being of the Delta and its people and it provides a legitimate ground for calling the Vietnamese prioritize development triple-race policy for the Delta into question which has been before that a difficult political debate to talk about in Bangladesh as I mentioned it became a means to achieve a middle income country status and it connects Delta planning now with the Bangladesh government's vision 2021 and 2041 so going back to that the Dutch government's promotional narrativeness represents what actually happens in the transfer so then what actually happens in the transfer it has this my doctoral research shows that it has little to do with technicalities that is widely transferred to an understand as Dutch net the knowledge or as part of managing Delta and this is the way we should know Delta and rather the transfer resembles to a series of collaborations and interactions in which both may involve actors and that what is transferred change in this case the Dutch Delta approach and the Dutch experts in the transfer process exchange and learn knowledge on Delta that is developed and refined in a non-Dutch setting and this results in hybridizing of Dutch water and Delta expertise in this case the Dutch Delta approach as we can see through seeing the examples of scenario development so the based on this insights I can say that there are room for discussion when discussion on whether this Dutch Delta approach that the Dutch government actively promotes as a must common policy solution for sustainable Delta management even exists and this calls for rethinking about the transfer and so what can be a way forward so I term it symmetrical conversation this normative approach of symmetrical conversation comes from my conversations long conversations with Dutch, Vietnamese, Bangladeshi experts involved in the transfer of Dutch Delta approach to different countries not only to Vietnam, Bangladesh but the US, Indonesia and Mozambique so based on their insights and experiences and their suggestions in the symmetrical conversation I propose not to shy away from how international politics work because I could see in my research that we tend to approach to manage Deltas as a first as a natural process and then in some cases as a social process but what I see that knowing Deltas or managing Deltas is also very much political and so we should not shy away from talking about the politics and in the symmetrical conversation it arges to explicitly discuss how to navigate this political and commercial interest of different actors and deal with the differences between the countries and the actors such as those based on wealth, power and authority think about the differences in the Netherlands and Vietnam and the Netherlands and Bangladesh so the symmetrical conversation approach allows to recognize and appreciate diversities existing from expertise, practices, cultures and languages so when I say symmetrical the term may give an impression that I am talking about or assuming that the different actors are on an equal platform or they are equal let's say or they are same in the symmetrical conversation the differences and the diversities are very much acknowledged and based on that acknowledgement it tries to show that how the parties are kind of relying on each other, how they are dependent on each other so an implication of the symmetrical conversation is that it makes the practices of maintaining friendship mutual learning and negotiation that happens in the transfer more explicit and prominent features of transfer not just like making it behind the scene activities that we should not talk about and should not be learned and inspired from to do the transfer process better and in a more mutual learning way so the hope with this is that it would create room for discussions about what good policies are so instead of the Dutch government saying that this is the solution that the world of delta countries need but the delta countries and the Dutch government sit together and discuss what can be a good policy for the Vietnam or Bangladesh or for Indonesia and this helps to rethink how different knowledges and knowers can relate to each other and come together for sustainable development of deltas that way new ways of knowing deltas would be created that would be more useful for Bangladesh and maybe for the Netherlands because they are also a delta country and they are according to the IPCC report all delta countries are vulnerable to climate change to conclude I would like to share some reflections looking back what I see that there is not one form of water knowledge and knower but some water knowledges and knowers they are recognized as an expert or a water leader than others because it has to do with their economic or political or geopolitical interests but it doesn't make the others as less vigorous water countries as the Dutch policy documents identify all the other delta countries outside of the Netherlands and I would say that all delta knowledges or all water knowledges are local and specific so it doesn't make the Dutch delta knowledges something global it's also local just like the water knowledges in Bangladesh and Vietnam because all these knowledges they come from somewhere they have specific histories like the history of Dutch water management which is very insightful and the Dutch are known for their historical water management and when we recognize these diversity in knowledge in managing deltas it would help to understand and question and hopefully change what is largely understand as sustainable delta management and recognizing this diversity I believe provides a nice entry point for rethinking about water and delta stepping back from this conventional way of knowing deltas in accordance to the Dutch and their emotional narrative just like what we can see in this image this is a workshop that happened in 2016 in Ho Chi Minh City organized by strategic delta planning research project where a group of experts Dutch, Bangladeshi and Vietnam they are discussing a case on and they are sharing their insights and learning from each other to come up with a planning for managing water in the province in the Mekong Delta to wrap up with I would like to reflect on if the Dutch government paying an attention to what the research is including myself are talking about or trying to draw their attention to it seems that a change is on the way they are there will be another five years program developing cooperation program in selected countries including Bangladesh and Vietnam but we have to see what happens then to understand this Dutch Delta developing cooperation 2.0 as I refer to and to end with I have to approach time to time the Dutch government officials and the experts who are very much actively involved in the transfer to inspire them to emphasize on my point that we need to see Delta's and do the transfer differently so how did I do that so I would like to end this presentation with that so I showed them I kind of played an ice breaking game so I showed them and satellite image of the Delta and they had to identify the Delta within a few seconds and all these people have in those my audience who were they have been involved for years and some for some it has been decades that they are working on those specific Delta's what I didn't tell them that I have rotated the satellite the orientation of the satellite images of the Delta so most of the time they couldn't identify the Delta's they have been attached with or have been working on so far I think I have played this game three or four times with a room full of Dutch audience and only one Dutch expert could recognize all four of the Delta's this is Bangladesh this is there is Vietnam there is Netherlands and also Myanmar so with this game I wanted to make my point that often we start we see and start to believe on ideas or on projections that the way they are presented they are as they are so I hope you find enough inspirations from my research to see things differently when you look at Delta's thank you thank you Shanu for your very interesting presentation and of course what you mentioned here is we can know Delta's and what are from many perspectives and we have many knowers and that is also something that we of course see in this master class series we are in the first master class and Philip knew a Delta from a soil water kind of perspective which sinking and shrinking saltier Delta's and Sanjayan looked as a sustainable livelihoods perspective we had Umer and Huang who presented it from an adaptive management and innovations perspective and I think also this morning earlier Ferdus presented our Mr Abdul who also knows his Delta in his perspective and you add another element to it there are quite some questions related to should we understand the Delta management as something or the discussion as something technical or is the core actually indeed political and what does that then also mean for Delta planning and sustainable development the Delta planning part of it is technical but a larger part is also very political and relational and these relationships appear in different forms some relationships are political like diplomatic relations some are friendship and collegiality between the Dutch and non-Dutch experts and these relationships are these corporations are sustainable management in developing cooperation are built or stand on these different forms of relationships not only on technical exchange of knowledge and would you then say from your perspective also that the Dutch then have actually been very successful in getting this Delta plan around the world or here it also matters who is asking the question and what that person means as a success because if you look from the perspective of the Dutch government it is a success because at the end they have a plan to show to the world among the Delta plan and the Mekong Delta plan so in that terms the product the deliverables so it is a success but from the involved experts point of view you know that it has been the Bangladesh Delta plan is more Bangladeshi than a Dutch so then what is the success what eventually is transferred or rather new knowledge has been created so it depends on one who asks a question and what success to him or her is one of the things you mentioned partly in well let's just use the word success of the translation or the translatability of the Dutch Delta approach is that it is actually a rather fluid concept than rigid and we also as you mentioned it maybe was a little bit more rigid when there were 12 building blocks now basically that idea has is gone which makes this more fluid and I was wondering in the past also in the Dutch politics on international cooperation it was about the the domine and the Kofman the reference and the merchant and the bias is this also not maybe a bias now in a strategically maneuvering diplomat in keeping international relations and the opportunistic international businessman developed unfortunately have a glitch yeah sorry I was lost so what I was trying to say I called it so yes this kind of transfer serves a useful purpose to nurture or maintain these diplomatic relations so sorry I kind of lost your question with the technical glitches I think yeah so is there also a balance or a deviation between the maneuvering diplomat to keep international relations and the opportunistic international businessman selling an idea yeah it is because this is also what the Dutch aid to trade policy is about to do good to the or to be by the side of their long term partners in managing that and also to create economic opportunities for the Dutch water sector okay thank you and also thank you for that last picture I think it was very insightful indeed often we know things on how they are presented to us and sometimes we need to stand upside down to get a view from a different perspective to understand it also from a different perspective which increases our knowledge base so thank you for that Shannour keep on the good work that you are doing also currently for Utrecht University and the Deltas network that they are supporting it is now 1055 here in the Netherlands that also means that we need to start closing this session but before closing this session I would like to highlight one thing and maybe I can ask one of the supporters in the back to share my screen because two weeks ago we had a little technical glitch when Badrul Hasan was presenting his work and we couldn't continue with this presentation two weeks ago but last week we have recorded his presentation and so in YouTube you can go to the IHC YouTube channel and go towards the videos and look for masterclass to part 2 which is now available and watch on Badrul Hasan's presentation on community management plus model for the governance of shared drinking water systems in coastal Bangladesh it has been very interesting let me then also now take the opportunity to thank all the people who have enabled this and first of you that is of course everybody who is now with us online joining these masterclasses having shared their comments we couldn't do this without you so thank you very much but then there are also some people in the back that needs to be sent those are Laura Kwak and Rachel Draker who have supported us in the back and Leon Hermans as well for also collecting your comments and questions and putting it forward to myself I would like to thank all the speakers in the past masterclasses Masterclass 1 we had Philip Minnehout and Saper Aslami then in masterclass 2 we had Badrul Hasan and Sanjay Annat in masterclass 3 we had Umakulsum and Forhwang and today Rubinal Verdoes and Shanu Hasan thank you very much for your insights for your knowledge and with those words I am going to finally thank NWO the Urbanizing Delts of the World Program first of all of course to supporting all these interesting research programs that have enabled these PhD and post-doc researchers in their knowledge development but of course also in supporting this masterclass series to be developed thank you very much and I am going to say goodbye