Sustainable Resilience at the Refugee–Host Interface: Settlement Conditions, Service Inequality, and Community Resilience in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Coastal displacement settings such as Cox's Bazar face resilience challenges shaped not only by hazard exposure, but also by settlement conditions, service reliability, and multi‐actor governance. This study develops and applies a household‐based Community Resilience Index (CRI) to assess resilience among refugee and host communities in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Using a convergent mixed‐method design, it combines a survey of 400 households with focus group discussions and key informant interviews. The CRI combines six resilience‐related domains with reverse‐coded perceived climatic hazard pressure. Adaptive and transformative summaries are theory‐guided groupings, while environmental conditions provide a limited proxy for absorptive conditions. Overall CRI was 0.40, with refugee households recording a lower mean (0.34) than host households (0.46). Environmental conditions had the lowest observed dimension mean, while institutional conditions and the reverse‐coded hazard‐pressure score were also comparatively low. Dimension profiles and qualitative accounts highlight warning actionability, settlement conditions, WASH and health‐service access, social protection, and accountable refugee–host governance as potential policy priorities.