Beyond Capacity: The Structural Divide Between National and District Journalism in Bangladesh’s Climate Diplomacy

Climate diplomacy in Bangladesh may reflect a structural gap between two tiers of media coverage. This qualitative study draws on four focus group discussions with 24 district journalists in Cox’s Bazar, Ukhia, Shatkhira, and Shunamganj from four of the country’s most climate-vulnerable districts and semi-structured interviews with 10 Dhaka-based national journalists (N = 34), conducted between August and December 2024 and analyzed through inductive thematic analysis supplemented by concordance-based coding. National participants engage with international diplomatic forums but report limited operational knowledge of ground-level climate impacts, while district-based participants hold granular, project-level knowledge of climate impacts, financial flows, and displacement yet describe themselves as structurally excluded from diplomatic representation. District participants also raised institutional barriers such as NGO and INGO opacity, restricted access to government information, and mismanagement of disaster relief that were largely absent from the Dhaka data and characterized climate financing as politically routed along lines of power rather than community need. These findings suggest that weak diplomatic representation may reflect an information-pathway failure rather than, or in addition to, a capacity deficit, with implications for media-inclusion research in climate governance.