LISTENING IS NOT A FORMALITY

When a road is widened, a power transmission line strung across paddy fields, or an embankment raised along a riverbank, the people who live nearby rarely see the project the way its planners do. Planners see alignments, budgets and timelines. Villagers see the corner of a homestead that will disappear, or the dust that will settle on their vegetable plots for two dry seasons. The distance between these two views is where most development projects in Bangladesh either earn public trust or lose it.

Over the past two decades, major donor-financed infrastructure projects in Bangladesh have increasingly incorporated two familiar safeguard tools: structured stakeholder engagement and grievance redress mechanisms (GRMs). The environmental and social frameworks and guidance of institutions such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, JICA and the AIIB all place requirements or expectations on stakeholder engagement and grievance handling. Consultation meetings are held, attendance sheets signed, photographs taken, and grievance committees notified by government order. Yet anyone who has spent time in project-affected areas knows that paper compliance and real engagement are not the same thing.

Stakeholder engagement, properly understood, is not an event but a relationship. It starts before the design is frozen, continues through construction, and lasts until the last compensation payment is cleared and livelihoods are restored. It means going to people rather than summoning them, creating appropriate spaces for women, ethnic communities, persons with disabilities and informal settlers to participate, and explaining entitlements in plain Bangla. Most importantly, it means being willing to change something because of what was heard.

The grievance redress mechanism is the other half of this relationship. Some project authorities still treat complaints as problems to be minimised, and a GRM register with few entries may be presented as proof of success. A nearly empty register may instead indicate that people do not know the mechanism exists, cannot easily access it, or fear the consequences of using it. A healthy GRM should receive complaints, because complaints can be early warnings: about undervalued land, households missed in the census, contractor misconduct, blocked drainage or unsafe working conditions. Each one resolved promptly can prevent a larger dispute later.

What makes GRM work not complicated. It must be accessible through several channels: a phone number, complaint boxes at places people can reach easily, such as union parishad offices and project sites, a field officer people recognise and, increasingly, mobile or online channels. It must be time-bound, with clear deadlines at each tier. Its grievance committees should include credible community representatives rather than relying only on project officials to judge complaints about project activities. It must protect complainants from retaliation, and it must report back, so people know what happened to their concern. And it should never block anyone's access to the courts or, where applicable, to the lenders' independent accountability mechanisms.

Bangladesh continues to invest heavily in infrastructure, often in densely populated and climate-vulnerable areas where land is scarce and livelihoods can be fragile. Our implementing agencies, consultants and contractors have built up considerable experience. The next step is to move from documenting engagement to institutionalising it: budgeting for it properly, training the people who manage it, and judging performance by accessibility, response time, quality of resolution and affected people's satisfaction, rather than simply by the number of meetings held.

Development built with people, not merely for them, may demand more time at the outset. But listening early can prevent avoidable conflict, improve decisions and build the trust on which durable development depends.