ICTs for Climate Resilience and Rural Development in Pakistan: Bridging Digital Divides for Inclusive Innovation

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Escalating climate risks in Pakistan’s high-altitude glacier regions increasingly test the adaptive capacities of rural communities. Yet the contribution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to these efforts seems to remain uneven and contingent. On the other hand, ICTs in the valleys of Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) bring forth far from straightforward solutions. Rather, their value seems to depend on how residents are likely to negotiate infrastructural fragility, gendered digital inequalities, and fragmented institutional support. This qualitative case study draws on 26 semi-structured interviews and 04 gender-segregated focus group discussions. It is further complemented by field observations conducted over a six-month period. Participants were recruited through purposive and community-mediated sampling to ensure the inclusion of elderly, women, youth, and locally embedded knowledge holders. Thematic analysis, informed by Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM3), guided the interpretation of how ICTs are adopted, questioned, or resisted. Findings seem to indicate that media technology tools such as satellite-based telemetry, Short Message Service (SMS) alerts, and Community-Based Flood Early Warning Systems (CBFEWS) may enhance anticipatory governance. Yet their uptake appears to remain constrained by low digital literacy, unstable connectivity, and socio-cultural norms that limit, particularly elderly women’s, access to technology. Respondents seem to repeatedly emphasized the decisive influence of Community Trust Networks, local religious leaders, teachers, and youth volunteers on whether ICTs are perceived as credible or usable. Comparative accounts further seem to suggest that ICTs gain legitimacy when co-designed with local actors when they are translated into vernacular forms, and supported through inclusive community-based training architectures. Whereas, top-down technology deployment, by contrast, tends to widen digital divides rather than bridge them. The study therefore, likely reframes ICTs as socially embedded infrastructures whose climate-resilience potential depends on relational trust, and gender-sensitive design. Moreover, sustained local capacity-building insights that may hold relevance across the wider Global South appear as a pivot point in this study.