From Water Scarcity to Resilience: A Policy-Oriented Framework for Community-Based Drought Management in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Drought has evolved into a persistent governance challenge across Southeast Asia. Its impacts cannot be attributed to climatic variability alone. Rather, they emerge from the interaction between climate change, fragmented institutional arrangements, and intensifying competition over water resources. Together, these dynamics undermine long-term water security and disproportionately affect rural livelihoods. Although a growing body of scholarship has explored adaptive governance and community-based water management, much of this work remains compartmentalized across disciplinary and administrative scales. As a result, connections between national policy frameworks, intermediary institutions, and local water practices are often insufficiently examined, limiting the applicability of existing research for integrated drought resilience planning.

To address this gap, this study undertakes a policy-oriented integrative review of interdisciplinary literature on drought governance and community-based drought management in Southeast Asia. Drawing on peer-reviewed research from environmental governance, water policy, and sustainability studies, the review examines how policy design, institutional coordination, and community participation interact in practice. Rather than treating these dimensions as discrete variables, the analysis considers their relational dynamics. A thematic synthesis approach is used to identify recurring governance mechanisms, enabling conditions, and structural barriers that shape drought management outcomes across contexts.

Building on this synthesis, the study proposes a Policy-Oriented Community Drought Resilience Framework. The framework conceptualizes drought resilience not as a fixed condition, but as an emergent outcome of multi-scalar governance interactions. It foregrounds policy coherence and institutional alignment as foundational elements, while recognizing the operational role of community-based water management organizations. The framework also emphasizes knowledge integration and iterative learning processes, highlighting feedback loops that connect drought experiences to institutional adjustment and policy reform over time.

Theoretically, this review extends adaptive and polycentric governance perspectives by underscoring the importance of coordination quality, institutional learning, and cross-scale linkages. It argues that resilience is less about the proliferation of governance actors and more about how effectively their roles are aligned. From a policy standpoint, the findings point toward practical pathways for shifting from reactive, crisis-driven responses to proactive and community-centered drought governance strategies. Although grounded in the Southeast Asian context, the analytical insights developed here are applicable to other climate-vulnerable regions confronting intensifying water scarcity.