Bangladeshi people use multiple strategies to live with flooding events and associated riverbank erosion. They relocate, evacuate their homes temporarily, change cropping patterns, and supplement their income from migrating household members. In this way, they can reduce the negative impact of floods on their livelihoods. However, these societal responses also have negative outcomes, such as impoverishment. This research collects quantitative household data and analyzes changes of livelihood conditions over recent decades in a large floodplain area in north-west Bangladesh. It is found that while residents cope with flooding events, they do not achieve successful adaptation. With every flooding, people lose income and assets, which they can only partially recover. As such, they are getting poorer, and therefore less able to make structural adjustments that would allow adaptation in the longer term.

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Socio-hydrology aims to understand the dynamics and co-evolution of coupled human-water systems, with research consisting of generic models as well as specific case studies. In this paper, we propose a concept to help bridge the gap between these two types of socio-hydrological studies: socio-hydrological spaces (SHSs). A socio-hydrological space is a geographical area in a landscape. Its particular combination of hydrological and social features gives rise to the emergence of distinct interactions and dynamics (patterns) between society and water. Socio-hydrological research on human-flood interactions has found two generic responses, "fight" or "adapt". Distilling the patterns resulting from these responses in case studies provides a promising way to relate contextual specificities to the generic patterns described by conceptual models. Through the use of SHSs, different cases can be compared globally without aspiring to capturing them in a formal model. We illustrate the use of SHS for the Jamuna floodplain, Bangladesh. We use narratives and experiences of local experts and inhabitants to empirically describe and delimit SHS. We corroborated the resulting classification through the statistical analysis of primary data collected for the purpose (household surveys and focus group discussions) and secondary data (statistics, maps etc.). Our example of the use of SHSs shows that the concept draws attention to how historical patterns in the co-evolution of social behaviour, natural processes and technological in-terventions give rise to different landscapes, different styles of living and different ways of organising livelihoods. This provides a texture to the more generic patterns generated by socio-hydrological models, promising to make the resulting analysis more directly useful for decision makers. We propose that the usefulness of this concept in other floodplains, and for other socio-hydrological systems than floodplains, should be explored.

Abstract. In this paper, we propose a concept that captures the different socio-hydrological patterns that result from different societal choices on how to deal with rivers, floods and erosion: 'socio-hydrological spaces'. Socio-hydrology aims to understand the dynamics and co-evolution of coupled human-water systems. Our proposed concept will help to understand the detailed human-water interactions in a specific location. This paper uses a socio-hydrological approach to describe human-flood interactions in the Jamuna floodplain, Bangladesh. In this vast space (a braided river bed of 6-16 km) the 15 differences between land and water are temporary and shifting. To illustrate how the concept can be used, we first classified and identified socio-hydrological spaces and then validated through the analysis of primary data (household surveys and focus group discussions) and secondary data (statistics, maps etc.) that were collected in 2015 and 2016. The principal set of primary data consists of approx. 900 questionnaires on several themes: flooding, riverbank erosion, social processes of the study area. The concept of SHS draws attention to how historical patterns in the co-evolution of social behaviour, natural 20 processes and technological adoptions give rise to different landscapes, different style of living, and different ways of organizing livelihoods. However, we contend that this concept could be used in other places and for other socio-hydrological systems than floodplains.

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