The study was conducted in informal settlements in Chittagong — settlements that had grown significantly over the preceding decade as climate pressure in the coastal chars and river-erosion zones of southern Bangladesh pushed families toward the city. Standard demographic surveys of these settlements existed; BRAC and UN-Habitat had both done coverage mapping. What did not exist was a granular account of what the displaced families were actually experiencing once they arrived.
We used photovoice. Participants — women from fifteen households across three settlement clusters — were given cameras and a broad brief: document your daily life, and particularly the moments where you encounter difficulty accessing something you need. The photographs became the basis for group discussion sessions, structured around what each image showed and why the photographer had chosen it.
Photovoice is often described as a method that gives voice to marginalised communities. This framing, while not wrong, understates what it actually does methodologically. What it does is change who controls the research agenda at the point of data generation. A survey questionnaire asks about what the researcher has already decided to measure. A photovoice protocol asks participants to identify what is worth documenting — which is a different question, and one that produces different findings.
The findings from the Chittagong study diverged from the survey data in two significant ways.
The first was the centrality of documentation. Survey questions about barriers to service access typically elicit answers about distance, cost, and provider behaviour. The photographs returned a different set of answers: several participants had documented interactions — at clinics, at schools, at water distribution points — where they were turned away not because of money or distance but because they could not produce address proof or identity documents. Displacement had severed their link to formal records. They had NID cards issued for their home districts, but these did not function as valid address verification in Chittagong. Children could not enrol in school. Mothers could not access maternal health services through the public system without a locally recognised identity document. The displacement had created a documentation gap that the administrative system was not designed to bridge.
The second was the social geography of exclusion. Photographs documented informal hierarchies within the settlements: which households had established relationships with local landlords, which had not; which women could access the tube-well at peak hours and which had to wait; which families' children played in certain spaces and which did not. None of this showed up in facility-level data, which recorded utilisation but not the social filters that determined who utilised.
The group discussion sessions produced something the photographs alone could not: a collective interpretation process in which participants challenged each other's accounts, proposed alternative explanations for images, and — crucially — identified which problems they considered addressable through collective action and which they considered fixed. The distinction mattered for programme design: some of the barriers participants identified were structural (documentation policy, clinic catchment rules) and required advocacy. Others were relational (exclusion from water access, children's play spaces) and were being actively negotiated by the community.
There is a technical caution worth noting. Photovoice studies produce rich qualitative data that is difficult to aggregate. The method does not lend itself to the kind of systematic coding that produces publishable frequencies, and researchers who try to force it into that mode usually end up with findings that are neither good qualitative analysis nor good quantitative description. The appropriate output is thick description: case material, direct participant quotation, and documented patterns that are illustrative rather than representative. Commissioners who want generalisable findings need to understand this before the study begins.
Bangladesh climate displacement data from Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and UNHCR operational data. Chittagong settlement coverage data from UN-Habitat's Bangladesh Country Programme. Documentation exclusion patterns corroborated by BRAC research on urban informal settlement access.