Bangladesh-India Border Haat Transactions: Where the ‘Local’, ‘National’, and ‘International’ Converge

How has the 2010 Bangladesh-India Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) performed? Designed to protect/promote indigenous communities through border haat transactions, this study finds growing post-pandemic ‘local’ engagements also attracting ‘national’ and ‘international’ interests: building infrastructures, mutual trust, and confidence, as well as the ‘spread-effects’ of economic transactions have deepened the need for ‘national’ security supports and distributive networks. Whereas the ‘local’ see win–win outcomes only through short-term prisms (‘here and now’), ‘national’ and ‘international’ interests carry longer-term outlooks. Either way, collective action triumphs over self-help, but the unpredictable strength of the latter suggests interdependent relations to be a more reliable theoretical predictor, albeit stopping well short of cultivating regional economic integration.