Identifying the Assemblages behind Narratives of Improvement

Building embankments in the present is not a new strategy designed to address climate change. From modern railways to climate-change adaptation, capitalist interests have long worked with the state to further their economic and political interests through large-scale embankment infrastructure. It is a continuation of state simplification that colludes with capitalist interest through capital-intensive projects justified through high modernist ideology. Colonial railway embankments replaced waterways and yielded profits for railway capitalists in London, while the postindependence Coastal Embankment Project provided capital-intensive technical assistance for Pakistan to modernize. While protests ultimately thwarted the 1990s Flood Action Plan (FAP) to build more permanent flood-protection embankments, the FAP promoters also represented capitalist interests allied with the Ershad regime. Today, state simplification works together with climate reductionism to maintain strategic ignorance of local contexts, such as the history of the expansion of environmentally disruptive, permanent embankments in a hydrologically active delta.

For example, the World Bank’s recent Coastal Embankment Improvement Project is based on the idea that climate change causes floods in Bangladesh. It is therefore climate reductive: it attributes all floods to climate change without acknowledging how embankments disrupt monsoon inundations and raise riverbeds, which results in damaging jalabaddho floods. In addition, embankments, by preventing annual sediment deposits on floodplains, contribute to silt becoming trapped in numerous water bodies. These rivers and canals are now dying, and the water retention capacity of the delta has been reduced. Having wide, deep, free-flowing rivers could otherwise help stave off precipitation uncertainties in the future. Thus, the simplified misreading of coastal Bangladesh as requiring higher and wider embankments perpetuates and worsens the very situation it claims to be mitigating.

Yet, development schemes not only fail because the state and capitalist interests collude through narratives of improvement (Scott 1998). The state itself is composed of diverse actors with different agendas. The colonial state was well aware of the negative effects of embankments; a range of colonial civil servants with local expertise, like Sir Arthur Cotton, Charles Bentley, William Willcocks, Rai Lahiri, and C. A. White, repeatedly pointed out the negative environmental consequences of permanently embanking an active delta with high sediment loads and meandering rivers that erode river banks in a country dependent on monsoon floods and riverine transport. The existence of dissenting voices highlights that there are often competing actors within the state. Those that vocalize narratives that further economic, geopolitical, or administrative agendas are better at harnessing support than those that dissent against such interventions. Thus, rather than a singular homogeneous “state” using “high modernist ideology” to “collude with capitalist interests” (Scott 1998), the promotion of railways, flood protection, and climate change adaptation are outcomes of particular actors within the state winning internal debates about what is accepted as knowledge at a specific time. The state—whether the East India Company, the British Raj, or Bangladesh’s Ministry of Water and the World Bank—recognizes contextual knowledge when it supports its specific interests and marginalizes it when it does not.

The link between embankments and siltation is marginalized in certain climate change projects (like that of the World Bank), and addressed in others (such as creating rural employment via canal excavation). Rather than a hegemonic development discourse where environmentally unsustainable translations of climate change are inescapable, heterogeneous development brokers with different agendas translate climate change in ways that further the goals of particular institutions and projects, where climate change funds can be used to both benefit and harm local populations. Bangladeshi development professionals actively participate in creating different translations of climate change—even when a particular translation is ineffective in solving a stated problem. However, such translations were often at odds with the environmental knowledge that Bangladeshi development professionals had of local context and complex environmental processes. I found that few Bangladeshi development professionals openly opposed climate reductive translations of embankments as adaptation infrastructure because of the fear of being blacklisted. To resolve the tension of being an international project employee and a knowledgeable Bangladeshi with their own informal and skeptical opinions, they would codeswitch between the official project metacode in English and their personal reflections in Bangla. Although this allowed them to use climate change as a spice in a pragmatic way, translations of embankments as an adaptation strategy to climate change contribute to the continued neglect of the problems of siltation, rising riverbeds, and jalabaddho floods.

Breaching Embankments: Shrimp Dispossession or Silt Management?

Certain development assemblages translate export-oriented tiger-prawn cultivation as an adaptive measure to salinity in a future of rising sea levels. When proponents of tiger-prawn cultivation state that salinity in Bangladesh is caused by rising sea levels, they deflect attention away from the fact that salinity in the coastal zone of Bangladesh is also seasonal, human-made, and reversible, ignoring the contentious violence and the dispossession that arises from wetlands and canal grabbing. Such a climate reductive translation that attributes salinity solely to rising sea levels is another example of state simplification, where particular sections of the state, the development industry, and the private sector collude to co-opt climate change to further their own aquaculture interests in ways that ignore a history of negative environmental and social impacts on rural livelihoods. The expansion of tiger-prawn farms reduced Sundarbans mangrove cover that protects against tropical storms. Tiger-prawn cultivation involves weakening the embankments by making incisions and installing pipes to bring in more salt tidewater during the dry season. Such high levels of salt reduces soil fertility, biodiversity, and the availability of local foods, thereby eroding the livelihood capacities of the poor. Furthermore, Cyclone Aila in 2009 and Cyclone Amphan in 2020 breached the damaged embankments in tiger-prawn cultivating areas—inundating whole villages with brackish water: crops were damaged, and many people migrated away because of the devastation of property. Thus, tiger-prawn cultivation not only exacerbates anthropogenic environmental degradation through forced salinity intrusion, it also increases coastal people’s vulnerability and risk during the tropical storms characteristic of the Bay of Bengal, which are expected to increase with climatic change.

Saltwater aquaculture results not only in wider loss of land and water commons, but also in suffering from living in a barren, nonfertile landscape. While people in Nodi were positive about the combination of agriculture and export-oriented aquaculture (golda prawn, crabs), they suffered in the barren deserts of tiger-prawn ghers that break embankments to bring in saltwater during the dry season when river salinity is at its highest. Such interventions, however, are different from Tidal River Management (TRM), where particular sections of the embankments are broken during the monsoon to relieve waterlogging and address how embanked floodplains are sediment starved. TRM does not constitute depolderization or the removal of embankments as part of a wider agenda of agrarian dispossession, but it may help enable longer agrarian futures. The main question is how to compensate those living in the polder communities; when the embankment is breached, they cannot farm. The 1990s top-down Khulna-Jessore Drainage Rehabilitation example shows how engineered solutions without proper local implementation result in poor results and conflicts rather than water governance remediation. As anthropologists have long demonstrated, bottom-up input from local people is invaluable in correcting the misreadings of top-down blueprints, for example in designing more effective Ebola management that builds trust and helps make the community’s voices heard (WHO 2015). Going forward, TRM should be designed in consultation with local stakeholders and compensate all polder residents through direct cash transfer via mobile technologies (bKash). Rural employment schemes consisting of pond and canal excavation should also be included in TRM implementation. This could help address the lack of rural work and mobilize local community support for such work.

The Commodification of Food: From Shakti to Bhejal

A common climate reductive translation of agricultural development projects is that as climatic risks increase, Bangladesh must use high-yielding seed varieties and agrochemicals to ensure food security for its population. Such a narrative does not engage with the paradox that food is exported out of the country, nor does it acknowledge the negative impact of intensive agricultural production on long-term soil health. Donors like the World Bank and USAID instead continue to push a similar package of interventions as in the past—then bundled under the Green Revolution—but is now rephrasing them as climate adaptation solutions. This rebundling does little to address the longstanding and severe problems caused by high-yielding, intensive agriculture dependent on agrochemicals and groundwater irrigation, while the lack of quality assurance of agrochemicals poses risks to human and environmental health. The continued focus on increasing yields deflects attention away from the problematic use of scarce water resources for export production. As my interlocutors repeatedly expressed, they are rarely able to taste the high-value tiger prawns and fish sent abroad. Furthermore, the privatization of common wetlands and the reduction of wild fisheries for the expansion of tiger prawns reduced their overall access to food.

A focus on exports as well as yields also ignores the physical health of the soil itself. The salinization of the soil from brackish aquaculture reduces the agricultural capacity to grow food today and in the future. In addition, decades of development projects and the promotion of high-yielding seed varieties has resulted in the extensive overuse of synthetic nitrogen, resulting in soil acidification, reduced soil fertility, and the inability to maintain current yields without increasing the quantity of fertilizer each year. Not only is reduced soil fertility a liability as climatic risks increase, the production of synthetic fertilizers are fossil-fuel dependent and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, thereby exacerbating global warming (Kahrl et al. 2010).

The continued promotion of high-yielding rice—known for decades to reduce biodiversity and increase soil acidification (Shiva 1993; Alauddin and Tisdell 1991) is also problematic in the face of changing weather patterns. My interlocutors in Nodi, such as Sadhu Kaka and Fupu, described how there were over a hundred different local (desi) heritage rice varieties prior to the introduction of IRRI (International Rice Research Institution) rice. Desi rice plants are tall with bitter leaves, and are grown with fertilizer rich in organic matter (cow dung, river silt, plants that decompose during monsoon inundation). In the past, farmers rarely needed pesticides because of the vast numbers of fish, frogs, and birds that ate insects. In contrast, IRRI plants are shorter and rely on agrochemicals for higher yields and for protection against pests, which is perceived to reduce shakti (power, strength, life force). Today, only a handful of IRRI rice varieties are grown in Nodi, having replaced most of the desi varieties. In the context of changing precipitation, temperature, humidity, and sea levels, growing a variety of plants with different properties diversifies risk; if there is a longer and intensive period of flooding, plants with higher nara (paddy straw) can survive, while local varieties that are more saline-and heat-resistant would be more resistant to irregular precipitation.

Since the introduction of IRRI rice in the southwest coastal zone in the 1980s, the over-and misuse of unregulated agrochemicals has resulted in many species disappearing from the soil. Globally, such agricultural development has included earthworms, nematode worms, soil mites, algae, insects, and fungi vanishing at a rapid pace (Smith 2011). This illustrates how the simplifications of industrial farming multiply beyond the original target species (Swanson et al. 2017, M6). As environmental anthropologists are increasingly pointing out, life forms are entangled with each other in symbiotic relationships. Disrupting such symbiotic entanglement across multispecies relations creates “monsters” of soil acidification, which culminates with species extinction. The ecological simplifications of the modern world—illustrated in ideas that adding nitrogen to HYV rice increases yields—“have turned monstrosity back against us, conjuring new threats to livability” (Swanson et al. 2017, M6).

People in Nodi described how the loss of fertilizing silt in the wake of embankments and the loss of a fallow period, during which livestock could graze freely and provide manure for agriculture, reduced shakti in the soil. This was exacerbated by the use of agrochemicals. Even though they did provide higher yields, they did not replenish the soil with shakti. This resulted in less shakti in the rice and ultimately less shakti in humans, making their bodies weaker. In contrast, desi rice varieties grown with cow dung and compost are filled with more shakti and nutrition. The idea that certain substances are rich in shakti and others are not reflects a mode of environmental knowing where humans, plants, food, and the environment are inseparable and possess qualities that for a long time have not been discernible through the quantitative and yield-centered models of [Western] agricultural science. Recent discoveries in microbiology and multispecies ethnography show how individuals are not so individual after all, that there are no bounded organisms separate from others. Life forms are entangled, particularly through symbiotic interdependence linked to bacteria and microbes. Concepts such as sympoiesis and holobiont, along with the latest findings on microorganisms, highlight how the inseparability of beings and the environments they live in is perhaps more than just “anecdotal” indigenous knowledge.

Furthermore, despite awareness of the negative effects of various agrochemicals, farmers continue to use toxic pesticides to save their crops and apply increasing amounts of synthetic nitrogen each year to compensate for declining soil fertility. Shop owners sell pesticides they know are toxic to avoid financial losses, while market intermediaries use formalin and ripening chemicals to avoid losing money on rotting food they cannot sell. The commodification of food is thus also about economic pragmatism in a context where food is reduced to yet another money-making commodity. Yet the shift to food as a commodity has resulted in a depersonalized and profit-oriented market detached from its sociomoral context. This enables farmers and food sellers to misuse chemicals in food production and distribution.

The translation of climate change as necessitating further intensification of agriculture and a dependency on agrochemicals is therefore another misreading of the Bengal delta. It does not address how the interventions it repackages as climate adaptation are part of the same industrial practices that has already made food production vulnerable. Nor does it recognize that Bangladeshis are more concerned with food safety (quality) than food security (quantity, yields). They are afraid not only of the loss of shakti, but also the toxic substances that pollute their food.

From Structural Adjustment to Structural Violence

Why is it that embankment maintenance is dependent on donor-funded projects and the people in Nodi are reliant on NGOs for their livelihoods? Why are development projects so active in promoting particular modes of agriculture? Why and how can banned agrochemicals be used in Bangladesh? Why does “food adulteration” take place, resulting in bhejal foods? World Bank and IMF loan conditionalities of the Structural Adjustment Policies (decentralization, trade liberalization, and deregulation) in the 1990s resulted in weakened public sector institutions in Bangladesh. This reduced state capacity for long-term maintenance of embankments and canals (Dewan, Mukherji, and Buisson 2015), while the focus on export-oriented cash commodities like tiger prawns occurred in a context of minimal public institutional structures to enforce food safety regulations.

Structural Adjustment Policies resulted in many Bangladeshis abandoning their expectations regarding the state, including such basic services as public healthcare and education. Donor support for vaccinations and antidiarrheal medicine help with acute problems, but most of the rural poor suffer from noncommunicable, chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and respiratory diseases, all of which are currently on the rise (see World Health Organization 2011). Many households in Nodi become indebted because of the high costs of basic healthcare and education. Such costs are internalized as private expenses rather than as citizen entitlements. Because of the Structural Adjustment Policies, low tax revenue, and four decades of donor dependency, rural Bangladeshis now expect very little from the state. Such costs are further exacerbated by having to pay bribes to get a job, extortionate fees for brokers to arrange work overseas, and increasing—and sometimes continuous—dowry demands. In aid-dependent areas like Nodi, people are lucky to be selected as “project beneficiaries,” competing with their fellow community members for scarce resources. In this context, the introduction of development interventions promoting earthwork, export-oriented tiger-prawn cultivation, capitalist agriculture, or microcredit wind up individualizing income while undermining nonmonetized livelihoods and eroding supportive social relations. Unequal access to healthcare and the means to support one’s family result in reduced life expectancies, which in turn constitutes structural violence, which is embedded in institutionalized inequality.

Currently, there is no national database of health indicators for the overall population to monitor these trends, just as there is no regular and consistent data collection on siltation and other hydrological information for the delta. A long-term national infrastructure needs regular funding, staff, and institutional capacity, and cannot be funded through short-term development projects. By evading the issue of state provision of social services to its citizens, the development industry perpetuates precarity after decades of reducing state capacity, which has had the unintended effect of ignoring the lived vulnerabilities of the population it seeks to help. These dynamics cannot be captured through a climate reductive translation where weakened livelihood capacity is mainly attributed to climate change.

Climate reductive translations in development projects risk obscuring the levels of deprivation caused by a combination of economic policies (brackish aquaculture, capital-intensive and high-risk agriculture) and social policies (the weakening of state capacity through structural adjustment policies). The reframing of coastal vulnerabilities as tied to climate justice diverts attention from the precarity and structural violence that arises in a context where the state no longer provides social services for its citizens. This reframing instead fuels a system of structural underemployment and high levels of debt to pay for dowries, healthcare, education, and labor brokering fees—all enabled by the high prevalence of microcredit NGOs in Bangladesh.

The Path Ahead

Climate change has come to dominate the current development paradigm in Bangladesh in diverse ways, while the Covid-19 pandemic brought out multiple dimensions of vulnerability. As increased amounts of funding are allocated to climate change, various assemblages of development brokers translate it in such a way that helps legitimize their project interventions. However, since there is a fixed sum of money available for aid (Hossain, Islam, and Saha 1987), an emphasis on climate change means giving less priority to other types of development activities, including addressing long-term political issues of structural violence. In addition, certain climate reductive translations misread the coastal landscape in ways that may exacerbate vulnerabilities to cyclonic storms by rearranging causality to legitimize short-term projects. For example, proposing embankment construction as climate adaptation neglects how they choke up waterways and increase jalabaddho flood risks. Similarly tiger-prawn cultivation as an adaptation to rising sea levels ignores how shrimp cultivators damage existing embankments to draw in saltwater, making them more vulnerable to breaches while salinizing the land and negatively affecting food sovereignty and life quality. Lastly, unsustainable intensive agriculture reduces both soil fertility and biodiversity required for strong local food production. By reproducing climate reductive translations, Bangladeshi development professionals risk diverting attention away from the creation of long-term solutions for Bangladesh as the causal mechanisms contributing to floods, salinity, and food insecurity continue to go unaddressed as a result of donor agendas. This is particularly problematic in the face of anthropogenic environmental degradation, climatic risk, and future health crises.

Engaged anthropologists have an important role to play in communicating everyday livelihood concerns to local, national, and global stakeholders. Our strength in analyzing processes of knowledge production while taking into account everyday livelihoods can help shed light on areas usually deemed as belonging to the sphere of natural scientists; through such work we can formulate real-world policy suggestions. For example, long-term solutions would include the public and formal acknowledgment by donors such as the World Bank and the Netherlands that embankments in the heavily silted Bengal delta worsen flood risks by trapping silt in the rivers, further reducing water availability in the dry season. Institutionalized and regular data collection of the extent of siltation is needed to establish how it can be resolved, along with including canal and pond excavation into rural employment schemes. Wider, deeper canals can retain rainwater from the monsoon until the dry season and several households in Nodi suggested that regular canal excavation using local labor would help them both with generating rural employment and resolving irrigation needs.

Tidal River Management is increasingly seen as a potential strategy for addressing the severe waterlogging caused by embankments. TRM, if implemented, should engage in rural employment schemes to excavate canals with local labor from the landless classes, and also pay a basic universal income to all residents in an embanked area where the embankment is breached to address siltation. Efforts must be made to stop dry-season saline tides from reaching the floodplains during these times if such breaches are made. However, breaching embankments to address the siltation problems of the delta must not be conflated with the desires of tiger-prawn actors to zone certain areas as incompatible with agriculture. Brackish aquaculture can be reversed as long as the embankment is closed and does not let in saltwater during the dry season. All donors should acknowledge that brackish aquaculture undermines Bangladesh’s food security aims.

Donor concerns about food security must also acknowledge the problem of food safety and the need for the state to enforce regulations to prevent food adulteration, as well as how a focus on yields must look into alternative ways of agricultural practice that help address soil acidification. During my fieldwork, local Bangladeshi researchers were experimenting with different manures and improving the yields of existing indigenous rice varieties; some donors were supporting such small-scale efforts too. This is a step in the right direction. In addition, Bangladesh already has several social security schemes. Greater state expenditure on healthcare and education would be a step toward reducing social inequality, as life expectancy varies according to an individual’s ability to meet these out-of-pocket expenses. Social protection should be a right, not a gift, and critical politics is essential in addressing the current challenges of waste, violence, and inequality (Li 2017), where grassroots movements (andolan) may hold potential in a transparent and free future.

Various coalitions of development brokers can translate climate change in ways that continue to promote existing capitalist activities, rather than questioning how they in fact exacerbate future climatic risks. Climate change adaptation solutions, such as embankments, brackish aquaculture, and intensive modern agriculture, are the latest repackaging of narratives of improvement dating back to colonial times. In the present, such translations risk becoming climate reductive, as floods, salinity, food insecurity, and coastal vulnerability are cast as caused by climate change. Such narratives oversimplify the complexity behind these phenomena and obscure the fact that capitalist practices and technologies weaken environmental and livelihood capacities. This is further exacerbated by widespread social inequalities arising from decades of Structural Adjustment Policies in an aid-dependent state. Engaging with context helps us move beyond narratives of improvement positing Bangladesh as a climate change victim and ensures that funds directed to climate change actually help strengthen coastal livelihoods and protect ecosystems.

Thus, the findings of this book add complexity to, and a deeper understanding of, the environmental and social problems facing coastal regions in the age of climate change. This serves as a cautionary alert concerning the ways in which well-intended climate reductionism can actually worsen vulnerability to climatic risks. Future research and development interventions must pay more attention to socioeconomic equality and scrutinize the actions of government decisions like introducing a coal plant in the Sundarbans (Rampal), industrializing the port of Mongla, and expanding industry in the former agrarian coastal region of Chittagong. To what extent may the promise of future growth worsen Bangladesh’s current problems of environmental degradation, pollution (air, water, soil, noise), and structural health inequalities both today and in a climate uncertain future?