Learning resilience: gendered adaptation and community-led water management in a resource-stressed village in a small island developing state

Access to clean and reliable water is fundamental to sustainable development, as reflected in Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6): ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. However, water scarcity is an intensifying global challenge, threatening ecosystems, public health and socio-economic stability, particularly in Small Island Developing States (SIDS): UN-recognized low-lying island nations with small economies, high climate exposure and limited resources. Climate change alters precipitation patterns and increases the frequency of droughts, while population growth and infrastructure deficits exacerbate existing pressures on water systems (IPCC, 2014, 2022; Mycoo and Roopnarine, 2024). In 2021, over 1.4 billion people lived in areas of high or extremely high water vulnerability, with disproportionate impacts on children, women and rural populations (UNICEF, 2021; UN-Water, 2023). While these figures highlight the scope of the crisis, its consequences are acutely experienced at the community level, especially in rural areas lacking piped infrastructure, institutional responsiveness, or climate-adaptive resources.

Resilience theory offers a lens through which to understand community endurance and adaptation to stressors. Community resilience is defined as the collective capacity to absorb, respond to, and recover from environmental and socio-economic disturbances (Norris et al., 2008). Rather than viewing affected communities as passive victims of climate impact, resilience thinking emphasizes local agency, knowledge systems and social organization as drivers of adaptation. In the context of water scarcity, this includes practices such as seasonal water rationing, informal sharing networks, rainwater harvesting, or community-led system maintenance. These adaptations reflect resourcefulness rather than reliance on formal infrastructure (Smit and Wandel, 2006).

However, adaptive capacity (skills, knowledge, networks and assets that enable adjustment to stress) is unevenly distributed. Vulnerability to water stress is shaped by intersecting factors such as environmental exposure, socio-economic status, infrastructure access and governance structures (Adger, 2006). In rural SIDS contexts, communities face compounded vulnerabilities: unreliable water systems, geographic isolation and weak institutional support. These vulnerabilities are often moderated or amplified by social structures and local knowledge, making the study of resilience both a technical and a social inquiry.

Gender plays a critical role in shaping both the experience and management of water insecurity. Women are frequently responsible for water collection and domestic water management, placing them at the frontline of both water-related burdens and adaptive solutions (Carvajal-Escobar et al., 2008). They often spend hours daily fetching water, managing household hygiene and safeguarding water quality. These labor demands affect their health, education and income-generating potential, yet their leadership efforts often go unrecognized (Wutich, 2009).

Another crucial but often overlooked dimension of resilience is social capital (Adger, 2003). Defined as the networks of trust, reciprocity and cooperation within and across communities, it is categorized into three forms: bonding capital (strong ties within the community), bridging capital (horizontal links to other communities) and linking capital (vertical connections to institutions or authorities) (Berkes and Ross, 2013). In water-insecure settings, bonding social capital facilitates informal water sharing, while bridging and linking capital support resource pooling, advocacy and access to external support. Communities with high social capital often show greater adaptive coordination in the face of infrastructural breakdowns or environmental shocks (Norris et al., 2008).

Despite growing recognition of gender and social capital in climate adaptation literature, policy responses remain narrowly focused on technical fixes, such as expanding infrastructure, drilling wells, or developing supply-side models, while undervaluing community-led strategies, informal institutions and social inequalities. To be effective, resilience planning must integrate an understanding of how people actually cope with scarcity and how social systems shape those coping mechanisms.

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of “Matelot”, a water-insecure village on the northeast coast of Trinidad and Tobago, a SIDS. Through interviews, observations and community surveys, the study explores how its residents respond to chronic water stress and how gendered roles, social networks and institutional engagement shape their resilience. The following questions guide the analysis:

1. How is water scarcity perceived and experienced within the community?

2. What locally developed adaptive strategies have emerged?

3. How do gender and social capital shape the community’s resilience capacity?

By addressing these questions, the study contributes to a grounded understanding of water resilience, highlighting the interplay of environmental vulnerability, local adaptation, gender dynamics and social cooperation. The findings offer insights for both scholarship and policy, emphasizing that sustainable water resilience must not only be climate-robust but also socially embedded and equity-driven. It also contributes to community-based organizational learning by capturing how grassroots institutions, such as Women’s Group, cultivate capacity, mobilize resources, and initiate adaptive governance in response to chronic water scarcity.

Climate change is amplifying the global water crisis by shifting precipitation patterns, intensifying droughts and straining freshwater systems (IPCC, 2014). The concept of vulnerability provides a framework to understand why certain communities, particularly rural ones, are more acutely affected by these changes. Vulnerability comprises three key dimensions: exposure (degree of climate stress), sensitivity (extent of harm) and adaptive capacity (ability to cope and recover) (Adger, 2006). In rural settings like “Matelot”, high exposure to seasonal droughts intersects with sensitivity due to water-dependent livelihoods and infrastructural deficits, creating conditions of chronic water stress.

Several frameworks, such as Turner et al.'s (2003) vulnerability model, emphasize that environmental change interacts with social systems across multiple levels. For instance, land tenure, market access and governance all influence how water scarcity is experienced. Even within water-rich regions, poorly maintained or inequitably managed infrastructure, like the gravity-fed systems in “Matelot”, can exacerbate vulnerability, independent of climate conditions.

Adaptive capacity, the ability to adjust to climate stress, is critical in determining resilience outcomes (Smit and Wandel, 2006). It is influenced by access to knowledge, institutions, technology and social support. In “Matelot”, it is manifested in the widespread adoption of rainwater harvesting, behavioral rationing practices and coordinated collective action. However, as observed in the breakdown of external infrastructure projects meant to supply the village with piped water, local adaptation efforts can be undermined by poor institutional support or non-contextualized interventions.

Community resilience expands the concept of adaptive capacity from individuals to collective systems. Norris et al. (2008) define it as the process by which a network of adaptive capacities enables a community to withstand and recover from disturbance. Resilient communities are marked by robust local institutions, communication, social competence and social capital. Social capital, in this regard, is both a resource and a process: it encompasses trust, norms and networks that facilitate cooperation (Berkes and Ross, 2013). In “Matelot”, bonding capital is deeply entrenched: residents routinely share stored rainwater and labor, and organize collective repairs to damaged infrastructure. Bridging capital appears in inter-household networks and church- or youth-based advocacy, while linking capital is more fragile, as illustrated by inconsistent state engagement and broken promises of technical assistance.

Berkes and Ross (2013) argue for a dynamic understanding of resilience as one that includes the capacity not just to absorb stress but to adapt and transform. This is visible in “Matelot”, where community-led adaptations like peer-to-peer hygiene education and informal borehole scheduling emerged in response to system failures. However, social capital is not always equitable. Marginalized groups, such as the elderly or geographically isolated households, may be excluded from informal safety nets, raising the question of resilience for whom and by whom?

Drawing on feminist political ecology, which examines how gendered power relations, social norms and institutional structures co-produce access to and control over environmental resources (Rocheleau et al., 1996; Sylvester, 1994), we foreground how water scarcity is both experienced and managed through gendered lenses. This perspective highlights that women’s everyday practices of collection, purification and distribution are both labor burdens and sites of innovation and negotiation over resource governance. By situating our case in this tradition, we link lived water-management strategies in “Matelot” to broader debates on equity, agency and environmental justice in rural contexts.

In “Matelot”, women are key agents of resilience. They developed low-tech purification methods, coordinated hygiene outreach and managed equitable water distribution through a community-based Women’s Group. This aligns with the findings from Carvajal-Escobar et al. (2008) and Wutich (2009). However, institutional decision-making in “Matelot” remains male-dominated, reflecting a disjuncture between those who manage water daily and those with formal authority over its governance.

Integrating a gender lens into resilience planning means not only valuing women’s knowledge and leadership, but also relieving them of disproportionate burdens. Gender-responsive strategies must reduce physical strain (e.g. ergonomic collection tools), ensure safety (e.g. location of water points) and increase participation (e.g. timing of meetings and committee inclusion).

This study conceptualizes community water resilience as an emergent property of intersecting environmental, social and institutional forces. Climate conditions set the external pressure through droughts and rainfall variability, but internal characteristics such as adaptive behaviors, gendered labor patterns and social networks determine how communities like “Matelot” absorb and respond to that stress. Figure 1 illustrates this interplay, positioning adaptive strategies as the mediator between environmental exposure and resilience outcomes, shaped by human and social capital, gender relations and broader governance systems.

Ultimately, the literature supports a multi-dimensional approach to resilience: communities are more resilient when they possess strong local knowledge, robust social capital, gender-inclusive governance and effective linkages to external resources. The following sections detail how these theoretical components materialize in the lived experience of “Matelot”, offering empirical insight into the dynamics of rural water resilience.

This study adopted an ethnographic qualitative case study approach to investigate the lived experiences of water access and usage in the rural community of “Matelot”, in a SIDS. Ethnography was selected for its capacity to provide a nuanced understanding of how individuals and groups navigate everyday life under resource constraints, in this case, a limited and unreliable water supply. The research was situated within a feminist standpoint theoretical framework (Harding, 2004), which informed the decision to adopt a community-engaged and practitioner-led inquiry model. Ethical approval was sought and obtained from the university for this study.

This research was designed not only as an academic investigation, but as a form of community-engaged and practitioner-informed inquiry. In line with work-applied methodologies, the study positioned community members, particularly women leaders in “Matelot”, not merely as research subjects but as active contributors to the knowledge production process. Co-creation followed a three-cycle participatory action-research model (Bradbury, 2015). Cycle-1 involved joint problem-scoping workshops with the Women’s Group, where research questions were ranked with sticky-dot voting. Cycle-2 comprised collaborative data interpretation sessions every six weeks, using large-format timeline charts to validate emerging themes and correct researcher bias. Cycle-3 translated findings into locally actionable recommendations, which participants refined using a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats matrix. This iterative process aligns with best practice in community-engaged scholarship and feminist research ethics (Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995) and transforms the researcher-participant dynamic into a more dialogic and participatory model.

This methodological stance also resonates with practitioner-led inquiry frameworks, particularly those emphasizing community ownership of adaptive strategies. Women who manage water daily in “Matelot” are not passive recipients of knowledge; they are de facto practitioners in the field of water resilience. Their experiential knowledge, developed through years of navigating chronic water scarcity, was treated as a legitimate and critical source of evidence. By centering their voices, the study supports the co-production of knowledge that can inform not only academic theory but also community practice and policy design.

“Matelot” is a remote, mountainous village located on the north-east coast of Trinidad and is isolated from the general population. Despite being in a water-rich ecological zone with rivers and springs, “Matelot” faces chronic infrastructural and service delivery deficits, particularly related to the reliability of piped water access. Only 36% of households reported receiving water in their homes, while 19% relied on rivers and springs, and many used rainwater harvesting or carried water from standpipes. The village has a population of fewer than 500 residents, with a high level of poverty and underemployment, and limited educational attainment (53.9% of residents reported primary school as their highest level of education). Traditional gender norms prevail, with men typically engaged in fishing or farming and women bearing the brunt of household water-related duties.

Initial entry relied on a two-step gatekeeping process. First, the regional council issued a formal letter of introduction, after which the village chief and elders granted verbal permission following a community meeting. Snowball sampling began with these gatekeepers, allowing us to identify women leaders and other key informants while respecting local protocols (Atkinson and Flint, 2001). We obtained written consent for all recorded activities and oral consent was used for illiterate participants, following the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago Ethics Committee guidelines. A reflective field diary documented power dynamics and positionality throughout the 12-month residency, enhancing transparency and replicability.

We collected data over a 12-month residency in “Matelot”. Detailed protocols (sampling frames, topic guides and coding manual) were used to facilitate replication (Yin, 2014), and data saturation (Fusch and Ness, 2015) was confirmed at the 12th semi-structured interview. This immersive fieldwork enabled the observation of both routine and exceptional water-related activities. Triangulation of data collection methods was a key design element, ensuring both breadth and depth of insight.

We employed the following methods. For participant observation, we conducted structured observations at water access points (e.g. “Matelot” River, standpipes and springs) and within three household types (male-headed, female-headed and jointly headed), capturing the gendered patterns of water use. Observations were logged daily. We also conducted 23 individual interviews, including 11 informal and 12 semi-structured interviews with men, women and key informants. These interviews elicited personal narratives on water access, burden, coping and aspirations. Key informants included school personnel, health officers and senior residents.

We conducted one focus group discussion (FGD) with 9 women from the local Women’s Group. The discussion focused on the impacts of water scarcity, coping strategies and perceptions of agency and power in household and community water governance. The session was recorded (with consent) and later transcribed for analysis. Finally, we administered a structured questionnaire to 40 households, representing approximately 38% of the total population. It included questions on water sources, usage patterns and intra-household task allocation. We used an adapted Harvard Analytical Framework activity chart (a gender-analysis tool that maps labor, access and control over resources) to map gendered labor divisions and time burdens.

Data analysis followed an iterative thematic approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Guest et al., 2012). Interview transcripts, field notes, and observational data were analyzed manually and with SPSS for descriptive statistics. Thematic categories were developed both deductively from the research objectives and inductively from emergent patterns in the data. Themes included gendered water burdens, coping and innovation, conflict at water sources and the implications of infrastructural decay. Activity chart data were analyzed to assess time allocation and role differentiation by gender. These findings were cross-referenced with qualitative narratives to validate patterns and reveal contradictions.

As outsiders, we faced skepticism from some residents, especially around expectations of government follow-up. Some residents feared repercussions for revealing illegal water connections. Furthermore, efforts to conduct a male focus group were unsuccessful due to social dynamics and cultural norms; instead, insights from men were gleaned through informal interviews. Literacy limitations among some participants required verbal explanations of survey questions. We mitigated these issues through extended engagement, assistance from a local Women’s Group leader and cultural sensitivity. Although data collection was limited to twelve months, rapport-building and methodological triangulation helped enhance the validity and trustworthiness of findings. Generalizability is naturally limited, but the detailed ethnographic insight allows for analytical generalization to other rural, underserved SIDS contexts.

“Matelot’s average annual rainfall of approximately 3,048 mm is higher than the national average. Yet, despite this, the community faces persistent and severe water insecurity. The public water supply, sourced from a tributary of the “Matelot” River via a gravity-fed intake system and a more recently added piped infrastructure, is unreliable. Only 36% of the surveyed households had indoor-piped access, and a significant portion (approximately 46%) had infrastructure but received no water due to dry or broken connections.

Water vulnerability in “Matelot” fluctuates sharply between seasons. During the rainy season, supply interruptions are caused by damage to the intake strainer during heavy rainfall. In the dry season, low pressure or no flow is the norm, particularly for households located at higher elevations. A nurse at the “Matelot” Health Centre noted an annual spike in gastrointestinal illnesses linked to unclean water use during these periods. Figure 2 presents a comparative breakdown of the primary water sources used by “Matelot” households in the rainy and dry seasons, highlighting differences between those with and without piped water connections.

To contextualize the community’s exposure to water scarcity, Figure 3 illustrates seasonal variations in household water sources and the adaptive shifts households make between the wet and dry seasons.

Compounding this, distance and terrain exacerbate the physical challenge of fetching water. Some residents must walk to the “Matelot” River or further during dry spells, often multiple times per day. The “Matelot” River, despite being a critical source, is not always clean enough for consumption without treatment.

The community of “Matelot” has not responded passively to these hardships. Numerous adaptive strategies have emerged through necessity and collective innovation:

1. Rainwater Harvesting (1980 – present): Approximately 79% of households use rainwater-harvesting systems during the rainy season. Residents store water in tanks, barrels, or makeshift containers. This reduces dependency on the unreliable piped supply.

2. Diversified Water Sources (1980- present): In the dry season, 75% of households without indoor water access rely on river water, and 12.5% use stored rainwater or nearby standpipes.

3. Rationing and Behavioral Adjustments (1980-present): Residents use water sparingly for household chores. Women often delay laundry, reduce bathing frequency and repurpose greywater. Some homes use boiled or chlorinated river water for drinking and cooking.

4. Collective Resource Management (1990- present): When the intake system is disrupted, residents mobilize to repair infrastructure or deepen wells. During past dry spells, the community organized cooperative labor efforts to restore access.

5. Community-Led Coordination (2000- present): The local Women’s Group has played a pivotal role in coordinating water access and raising awareness of hygiene and conservation. Their advocacy has led to improved local scheduling of borehole usage and maintenance funding drives.

These adaptive efforts reflect high levels of local agency.

“Matelot”s water burden falls disproportionately on women and girls. Ethnographic observation confirmed that women are the primary water managers in households: collecting, storing, purifying and using water with precision. Women have also led most of the innovation and advocacy in response to water issues. The local Women’s Group exemplifies how female leadership has enabled the community to develop shared hygiene practices, resolve disputes and coordinate resource distribution. However, institutional power remains male-dominated, as key decisions about infrastructure remain under the authority of male-led councils.

There is also a psychosocial toll. Many women expressed fatigue, anxiety and sleep disruption due to their responsibilities. One noted, “We watch the rain and pray, because when the tanks are dry, it is our backs that carry the load”. Despite this, women’s knowledge about water timing, storage and quality is central to household resilience. They possess an implicit hydro-literacy based on years of observation and daily engagement with water sources.

Social capital in “Matelot” is a key resilience asset. Residents described a strong ethic of mutual aid and reciprocity. It is customary that households with surplus water share water with others during droughts, often without formal agreements. Trust and informal reciprocity underpin this culture.

Institutionally, community groups like the Women’s Group, youth association and local religious organizations help coordinate collective action. During a borehole failure, residents with rainwater storage shared supplies and others organized repair efforts. Church groups and youth clubs engage in educational campaigns about water conservation.

Linkages to external support exist but remain fragile. Engagements with the National Water and Sewage Authority (WASA) and local government have resulted in infrastructure projects such as linking to an external pipeline and rainwater training workshops. Yet, these often lack follow-ups, leaving villagers feeling abandoned and skeptical regarding outside promises.

However, the “Matelot” experience illustrates how even under marginal conditions, strong internal bonds, knowledge sharing and adaptive behavior can support community resilience. Social capital, both bonding (within the village) and bridging (with external institutions), helps “Matelot” cope with seasonal water stress. However, as climate variability increases and infrastructure ages, this resilience will require greater systemic support to remain effective.

The discussion revisits the research questions in the same order they were presented. The case of “Matelot” provides a grounded and nuanced understanding of community resilience to chronic water scarcity in a rural, infrastructurally underserved setting. Drawing on the lived experiences of residents, three major themes emerge: (1) the interplay between vulnerability and adaptive capacity, (2) the centrality of gender and social capital in shaping resilience, and (3) the limits of autonomous adaptation and policy implications.

“Matelot” exemplifies how environmental exposure and infrastructural limitations create structural water vulnerability, but also how local communities develop significant adaptive capacity over time. Despite its location in a high-rainfall region, the village’s gravity-fed piped water system remains unreliable due to poor maintenance, elevation-related flow issues and damage during storms. This is what scholars term the “paradox of plenty”: water-rich regions still suffer scarcity due to governance or infrastructure failure (Lankford, 2010). A similar pattern has been observed in Pacific small-island states (Pathirana, 2025). As a result, many households experience seasonal or year-round service interruption. Similar dynamics occur across other SIDS (IPCC, 2022).

In response, the community has developed a diverse portfolio of adaptive practices. These include widespread rainwater harvesting, river water use, water rationing, reuse of greywater and selective prioritization of household tasks. Nearly 80% of households harvest rainwater in the wet season, and over 75% of unconnected homes rely on river water in the dry season. These strategies demonstrate how experiential knowledge and necessity-driven experimentation build adaptive capacity. This mirrors global patterns of risk-spreading in rural adaptation (Sengupta et al., 2020). However, the case also shows the limits of such adaptations. For instance, when a key intake strainer breaks or pressure drops to zero in upper zones, residents must walk to the river multiple times per day, enduring fatigue and health risks. Despite the community’s creativity and effort, there are clear signs of “adaptation fatigue”, where residents are doing more with less, but their coping mechanisms are stretched thin. This echoes recent work on resiliency fatigue after repeated hazards in rural U.S. communities (Davis et al., 2024). The pipeline extension from the nearby village was an external intervention that failed due to lack of maintenance and community training, reinforcing caution about top-down fixes that ignore local realities. In line with Smit and Wandel (2006), the “Matelot” case affirms that adaptation is a process learned over time. However, without sustained external investment and technical support, this adaptation may stall or become maladaptive.

Perhaps the most striking dimension of ‘Matelot’s resilience is its gendered structure. Women and girls bear the brunt of water scarcity (UN-Water, 2023; Carr et al., 2024), spending up to 4–6 h per day on water collection during the dry season. This time burden limits women’s opportunities for rest, income generation and participation in formal leadership. Yet, paradoxically, women also lead most of the adaptive innovations. They manage household rationing and initiate hygiene education through peer teaching. The local Women’s Group is a cornerstone of “Matelot’s” social resilience, coordinating water access, organizing repairs and advocating for hygiene practices, consistent with recent feminist political-ecology analyses of water security in Nicaragua (Bacon et al., 2021).

Despite lacking formal power in the male-led village council, women’s de facto authority over water is recognized through their ability to mobilize others, spread knowledge and maintain order at access points. Their informal governance fills critical gaps in state service provision. At the same time, the emotional and physical toll on women is real. Many described anxiety, sleep loss and bodily exhaustion from water labor, especially during prolonged dry spells. This points to the importance of gender-responsive planning, not only involving women in policy, but also reducing their disproportionate burden through infrastructure and tools.

Figure 1 conceptualizes resilience as a function of environmental exposure, social capital and gendered labour. Chronic supply failures amplify women’s physical and psychosocial load; our findings resonate with cross-regional studies documenting musculoskeletal strain and time poverty when infrastructure deteriorates (Bennett et al., 2019; UN-Water, 2023). Social capital tempers these stresses: bonding networks facilitate water sharing, joint river trips and collective action during pump breakdowns. Quantitative modelling from rural Iran shows that six dimensions of social capital explain 68% of variance in household flood resilience (Savari et al., 2024). In “Matelot”, however, linking capital remains weak, a common limitation in SIDS where episodic interventions rarely build long-term capacity (IPCC, 2022; Pathirana, 2025).

The village’s failed pipeline extension illustrates how top-down projects falter when maintenance funding and community training are absent. Recent evaluations of donor-funded rural water schemes across Sub-Saharan Africa reach similar conclusions: technology transfer succeeds only when embedded in local governance structures (Islam, 2024). Policies should therefore (1) finance gravity-fed repairs and rainwater-harvesting retrofits, (2) formalize women-led water committees in decision-making hierarchies and (3) establish responsive maintenance contracts with local technicians. Such measures align with emerging best practices for climate-resilient water services in SIDS (Pathirana, 2025) and could relieve the adaptation fatigue now evident in “Matelot”.

Recent work on equitable resilience argues that analyses must ask who bears the costs of coping and not only whether a system survives. Intersecting axes of age, gender, and spatial location shape both exposure and agency (Forsyth et al., 2022; Fox et al., 2023). In “Matelot”, households farthest from standpipes, older residents and families without able-bodied members face the longest collection times and the highest health risks, confirming that spatial marginality amplifies vulnerability even within a single village. Small-system studies from Zambia and four U.S. towns found that outage frequency and diarrheal incidence rise sharply with distance from network nodes, underscoring the need for location-specific, not blanket, support (Thomas-Possee et al., 2024; Deslatte et al., 2024). As climate pressures grow, “Matelot” faces a choice between incremental adjustment and transformative change. While residents remain committed to place and culture, transformative options, such as piped water mini-grids or community-run infrastructure co-ops should be explored. Any such shift must preserve the community’s social fabric, particularly the strong cooperative norms and gendered knowledge systems that underpin existing resilience.

Strengthening resilience in underserved settings such as “Matelot” requires simultaneous attention to technical upgrades, social equity and institutional learning. Context-sensitive infrastructure remains the entry point: retrofitting the gravity-fed line with pressure-regulating break tanks, localized chlorination units and community-managed rainwater farms can reduce outages and contamination, provided designs reflect the village’s steep elevation gradients and maintenance capacity (Nicol et al., 2021). Such investments must be co-produced with the informal institutions, especially the Women’s Group, that already coordinates rationing, repairs and hygiene campaigns. Modest stipends, reserved seats on local water councils and access to repair funds will formalize these contributions without undermining grassroots autonomy (McOmber et al., 2020).

Gender-responsive governance must also relieve, not just recognize, women’s labour. Ergonomic collection tools, safe access paths and flexible meeting schedules redistribute time burdens, while embedding women’s experiential knowledge in design decisions yields more durable systems (Van Houweling, 2015; Aregu et al., 2020). Bridging structures (joint community-utility task forces, shared maintenance calendars and mobile feedback apps) can rebuild trust and cut repair times, mirroring the accountability gains seen in other decentralized water partnerships (Meinzen-Dick, 2007).

Because water insecurity erodes livelihoods, resilience initiatives should bundle vocational training in water-efficient enterprises (e.g. drip-irrigated kitchen gardens, aquaponics) with micro-credit programmes. Evidence from East Africa and South Asia shows that gender-inclusive livelihood diversification stabilizes income and cushions households against supply shocks (Clement et al., 2019). All interventions must target the most vulnerable (households at network edges, the elderly and people with disabilities) through intersectional vulnerability assessments, subsidized storage and mobile water deliveries during acute shortages (Howard et al., 2016). Enhancing bonding and bridging social capital through peer-learning exchanges, youth engagement and joint preparedness drills further amplifies adaptive capacity (Aldrich and Meyer, 2015).

For practitioners, the findings endorse an action-learning cycle in which local actors iterate “problem-action-review” loops and are treated as reflective practitioners, not passive beneficiaries (Revans, 1982; Raelin, 2007). Societally, integrating intersectional climate-justice mapping into national small-island water policies can surface hidden inequities and improve the cost-effectiveness of scarce adaptation funds (Bennett et al., 2019). Research should now track longitudinal change in adaptive capacity, evaluate the durability of community co-ops and compare rural settlements across small-island developing states to distill transferable design levers (Thomas and Ahmad, 2020; Mycoo and Roopnarine, 2024). Mixed-method impact studies that combine process-tracing with quasi-experimental counterfactuals would help quantify how community-led governance alters service reliability and gendered labour burdens (Bamberger, 2020), while collaborative cross-case analysis can map learning loops among villages (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017). Interdisciplinary approaches that blend ethnography, participatory GIS and remote sensing promise richer insights into the socio-hydrological feedback that shapes resilience trajectories (Nightingale et al., 2022).

This study examined how the village of “Matelot” confronts persistent water scarcity by mobilizing adaptive strategies rooted in lived experience, gendered labor and strong social networks. Ethnographic evidence reveals that resilience in “Matelot” is not the product of a single intervention but emerges from the interplay of climate vulnerability, adaptive behaviors, gendered knowledge systems and collective action. Women, while disproportionately burdened, lead many of the community’s most effective responses and exemplify the need for gender-inclusive water governance. Social capital, especially bonding within the village, has proven critical in enabling cooperation and mutual aid during periods of acute scarcity. However, the case also underscores the limits of community self-reliance without sustained institutional support and targeted infrastructure investment. As climate variability intensifies, policy responses must amplify local strengths while addressing structural inequities. Ultimately, “Matelot” demonstrates that effective water resilience is not only environmental or technical; it is profoundly social, gendered and collective. These insights are relevant to applied management and development fields seeking scalable, equity-focused models of local capacity building and organizational change.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the residents, particularly the local Women’s Group, of “Matelot” who generously contributed their time and insights.