Introduction
Climate Reductive Translations in Development
In 2018, climate-related overseas development assistance totaled US$33.2 billion globally, up from US$24.2 billion in 2014. In order for countries and NGOs to access this funding, climate change adaptation or mitigation must be a principal or significant goal of development interventions (Donor Tracker 2021). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ranks Bangladesh as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world, and climate change is now mainstreamed into all of Bangladesh’s development activities (Lewis 2010; Alam 2019). From 2011 to 2018, donors and development agencies (including EU member states and the World Bank) allocated approximately US$20.59 billion to Bangladesh.1 In 2012 the World Bank allocated US$400 million for flood-protection embankments as climate adaptation infrastructure. To access such considerable funding streams, nongovernmental organizations, state bureaucracies, and research institutions in Bangladesh must ensure that their project proposals for development interventions appear as climate relevant. Often, such project proposals rely on appealing to donors’ perceptions of Bangladesh’s low-lying floodplains as being at particular risk as global sea levels rise, making the country an “epicenter of climate change” (Cons 2018, 272).
The common reading of Bangladesh as a victim of climate change assumes that as global warming increases, ice caps will melt, sea levels will rise, low-lying Bangladesh will drown, and people will flee because of floods and increasingly frequent natural disasters (cyclones), thus in turn becoming climate change refugees (Jolly and Ahmad 2019; Vidal 2018). While simplified narratives may help make development interventions seem related to climate change adaptation or resilience in order to attract aid funding, does it accurately capture the causality of floods in complex coastal landscapes? Might it even risk exacerbating environmental degradation and increasing coastal vulnerability to climatic change?
Bangladesh is located in the largest delta in the world, formed by the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers. This is a hydrologically active delta with meandering rivers that continuously reshape the land, through both erosion and sedimentation. Each year, these rivers carry approximately 40 billion cubic feet of silt on their journey from the Himalayas down to the Bay of Bengal—an incredible 25 percent of the total annual sediment of the world river system (Iqbal 2010). Silt can be described as part water and part mud (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2013, 7) and is the intractable soil-water admixture particular to the Bengal tidal basin (Bhattacharyya 2018). Accumulated sand and silt are embedded into riverine environments making it hard to distinguish solid land from fluid waters, especially during the annual monsoon. Indeed, silt destabilizes a clear dichotomy between land and water. Silt in these waters have, after all, the ability to raise existing land levels and create new land masses in the rivers, locally known as chars, best described as islands made of silt. Silt can change whole waterscapes and ecologies. In the unembanked Sundarbans mangrove forests, the flooding of silted river water raises land levels each year, keeping pace with sea level rise (Auerbach et al. 2015).
This silted delta has an innate ability to adapt to a certain amount of sea-level rise caused by global warming. Together with monsoon rains, rivers, canals, (agricultural) wetlands, mangroves, and char islands (da Cunha 2018), the hydrological characteristics of this delta complicate narratives of Bangladesh’s vulnerability to rising sea levels. A misreading of the coastal landscape, such as viewing embankments as “flood-protection” infrastructure against rising sea levels, diverts attention away from environmental processes that compromise Bangladesh’s ability to withstand future climatic risks.
Misreading the Bengal Delta combines detailed environmental history with an ethnographic study of southwest coastal Bangladesh to show how the development industry tends to simplify the complexities of a wetlands delta in ways that may exacerbate environmental risks and the vulnerability of the people it seeks to help. My intent is not to deny climate change, but to show the risks of development projects attributing environmental change to climate change, even when it is not the case. Until the 1990s, global warming was often associated with “climatic change,” an index of change in the climate system to which interseasonal variations in weather would contribute. Since then, the term has been increasingly replaced by “climate change,” a discursive shift from an adjective to a noun that denotes the role of climate as the main causative agent of interannual weather variation (Hulme 2015; 2011). Climatic change denotes the physical effects of anthropogenic global warming. It is a real material phenomenon that will subject Bangladesh to a certain amount of sea level rise, changing monsoon patterns, variability of the dry season, and increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones, thunderstorms, and tidal waves (Hanlon, Roy, and Hulme 2016). By differentiating between physical processes of climatic change and the discursive ideas of climate as the main cause of change, this study demonstrates how climate change can be a powerful discursive phenomenon that alters expectations of causality.
As more attention and resources are shifted toward tackling climatic change both in the Global North and Global South, it is necessary to recognize that knowledge production of climate change is situated in particular social contexts (Barnes et al. 2013). Detailed ethnographies anchored in real places, ecosystems, and societies can illustrate the complex environmental challenges that face many low-lying coastal countries: the double-edged swords of flood-protection embankments and their interwoven relations with meandering rivers, sedimentation, and different types of local floods.
In this post-truth era, critical engagements with scientific research run the risk of being co-opted by climate change deniers to dismiss the scientific consensus on global challenges caused by anthropogenic climatic change (Kofman 2018; Latour 2004). To support anthropologists’ efforts to advocate for climate justice globally, Susan Crate has advocated for the practice of “climate ethnography” to describe local experiences of weakened livelihood capacities: “By using the term environmental ethnography, we lose both the urgency and reflexivity necessary to advance our methods to address climate change. . . . Climate ethnography, by contrast, is tied to the global phenomenon and communicates a sense of immediacy and of an ethnography with a mission” (Crate 2011, 185).
Although this concept acknowledges multistressors and other environmental factors that affect livelihoods, it risks suggesting that climate change is a causative agent—that is, that it causes most of the environmental problems local people are experiencing. Archaeological analysis of human agency and historical climatic change shows that the impact of any climatic event depends on the local and social ecological settings in which they take place, urging caution against simplified notions of change that attribute causality to climate change alone (Hassan 2009). By replacing “environmental ethnography” with “climate ethnography,” anthropologists may be at risk of losing a holistic understanding of localized processes that are tied to context-specific anthropogenic land-use practices, environmental degradation, and social issues that affect livelihoods in specific places.
The use of “climate ethnography” may thus play a reductive role in describing human–environment interactions and increase the risk of “climate reductionism”—a trend that ascribes all changes in the environment and society to climate, where climate plays a reductionist role in discourses about the environment, society, and the future (Hulme 2011). As political ecologists point out, climate change adaptation is an increasingly political industry: “In this vast industry of work on adaptation to climate change, critical social science and hard-edged political economy are strikingly absent. The rough and tumble of actual struggles and the relations between households, communities, and powerful state and corporate agents are missing” (Peet, Robbins, and Watts 2011, 10).
A growing body of anthropological literature engages with the politics of knowledge production about climate change. In Egypt, climate change is not the only factor that will shape water availability, yet the political decisions about water allocation and access are neglected when discussing Egypt’s water future through the lens of climate change (Barnes 2015). In Vietnam, ethnographic fieldwork among environmental policymakers highlights the social embeddedness of knowledge production where real climatic change coincides with “discursively and socially constructed climate changes” (Zink 2013). Ethnographic specificity can also be used to understand the different levels of performativity required in building expertise amid a changing climate affecting mangroves in Guinea (Vaughn 2017) and to understand how Western development professionals come to imagine climate heterodystopias in the Global South (Cons 2018). By deconstructing the production of knowledge (and ignorance), anthropologists are thus able to critically engage with discourses of climate change at both local and global levels.
A historical approach to human perceptions of climatic change helps to further unpack the complex relationships between society and climate (Barnes and Dove 2015). Carefully examining the colonial and postcolonial history of flood-protection embankments, aquaculture, and agriculture in the dynamic delta of Bangladesh, this book shows how knowledge about climate adaptation is not necessarily bifurcated between different groups of experts (Vaughn 2017), but can be contained within the same individual. While it is important that anthropologists relate local community experiences of adaptation to climate change to global policy levels (Crate 2011), it is also imperative that anthropologists reflexively analyze discourses of climate change. This is particularly the case in development projects, which are sites of competing interests and conflicting agendas (Mosse 2005), resulting in divergent conceptions of the very notion of climate change. Such a critical approach to the knowledge production of climate change by particular actors and interests can help shed light on how policy discourses may work as instruments of governance to “identify the mobilizing metaphors and linguistic devices that cloak policy with the symbols and trappings of political legitimacy” (Shore and Wright 1997, 3). Bangladesh’s ability to deal with environmental challenges is entangled with the priorities and funding concerns of international bodies—an inherently political dynamic that constitutes an example of unequal power relations at global levels. This monograph contrasts the narratives of climate-funded projects with local environmental history and the lived experiences of social and environmental problems. By doing so, it illustrates the broader dynamic interrelations between development, anthropogenic environmental problems, and climatic change.
Decolonizing Development in Bangladesh
Climate change is increasingly, and intimately, tied to significant financial funds distributed through international development. As such, it is important to look at how development in the form of capitalist (extractive, colonially rooted) practices forms part of current representations of Bangladesh. I am a second-generation Bangladeshi born and raised in Sweden, and I have grown up in a society where media portrayals of Bangladesh are often victimizing, pauperizing, and condescending. This book is a decolonial project that historically situates “development” in Bangladesh and the continued image of the country as poor and vulnerable in order to understand the links between colonial knowledge production and the knowledge production of climate change.2
The concept of “decolonizing development” contests the ways in which development has been used as a way to legitimize external actors radically altering environment and societies in former colonies of the Global South. This is part of a wider agenda of decolonizing the curriculum and higher education, which is based on the assumption that global histories of Western colonial domination have had the effect of limiting what counts as authoritative knowledge, whose knowledge is recognized, what universities teach, and how they teach it. The university, as a privileged space of knowledge production and dissemination, is a key site where the historical legacy of colonial social constructions, imaginaries, practices, hierarchies, and violence still resonates today (Decolonising SOAS 2018). The image of Bangladesh as a climate change victim reproduces such historical imaginaries of its inferiority while ignoring its complex past.
The state of Bangladesh came into being through two traumatic partitions—one in 1947, where independence from colonial rule also split Bengal in two (West Bengal to India, East Bengal to newly created Pakistan), and the other in the 1971 War of Liberation, when East Pakistan broke away from oppressive West Pakistani rule to reclaim Bengali language and culture. Yet despite eastern Bengal’s central importance in British India, Bangladesh often falls out of discussions of the history of India. For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Fabric of India exhibition (2015) included colonial-era textiles from Dhaka (now in Bangladesh), but the modern-era textiles in the exhibition were only from the nation-state of India (created in 1947), thus excluding both Bangladesh and Pakistan. The separation of West Bengal in contemporary India and East Bengal in Bangladesh is noteworthy since the Bengal region was integral to “India” and its ancient history goes back to when it formed part of the Maurya and Gupta empires in northern India. The Pala empire was established in Bengal in the eighth century and continued until the twelfth century. It was the dominant power in the northern subcontinent. At the height of its power, it included parts of modern-day eastern Pakistan, northern and northeastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh (Majumdar 1991). The Pala Empire had a strong administrative system from the village level to central government, including a system for tax collection. It expanded Buddhism; created outstanding works of art, literature, and architecture; implemented policy oriented toward the welfare of the people; and undertook public works like excavating water tanks, ponds, and canals (Majumdar 1991). After Pala’s fall, various dynasties ruled wider Bengal, from the Sena dynasty to the Moghul empire in the sixteenth century. State administration continued with complex systems for revenue collection and public works—but this came to change under the colonization of Bengal under the East India Company and the British Raj.
British colonial officials came to use representations of “modernity” and “progress” to legitimize the exploitation of the Indian subcontinent, its natural resources, and its people. Through its efforts to understand its “subjects” and comprehend the internal workings and logic of India, the colonial state created various censuses, surveys, and classifications (Cohn 1996) and ethnographies (Dirks 2001, 59; Willford and Tagliacozzo 2009, 2). Regardless of whether or not the flawed categorization of Indian knowledge was intentional, colonial knowledge cemented a view of India as a Hindu, caste-stratified, ancient, unchanging village society (Cohn 1996)—an image further reproduced through official colonial documents (Cohn 1996; Dirks 2001). The British administration increasingly engaged in historical revisionism and instructed their officers through James Mill’s (1817) The History of British India, a book that ignored ancient Indian history and emphasized British superiority (Hill 2008, 90–91). This construction of India and its diverse population served to alienate non-Hindu groups from the narrative of India (Cohn 1996). While Indians would negotiate and reconstitute their identities, they could only do so within the limits of these colonial categories (Arnold 2009, 34). As an increasing number of Bengalis joined the British as civil servants during the Raj (1857–1947), the narrative of superiority crept into the minds of some Indian colonial subjects, who reproduced British claims of progress by viewing precolonial institutions as traditional to legitimize colonial interventions as a means to reach Western modernity (Chattopadhyay 1990).3
This is in turn linked to the perceived superiority of the European Enlightenment that emphasized rational knowledge and the importance of technology and science. The historian Fredrik Cooper suggests that modernity is a way of talking about the world, where western Europe is the model to which the rest of the world should aspire. Such a representation casts modernity as a condition in and of itself; it creates a story of people becoming modern. The colonizer’s society is presented as “advanced” and embodying “progress,” while colonized societies are portrayed as “traditional” and “backward” (Cooper 2005). Modernity has come to be associated with progress, development, the West, science and technology, high standards of living, rationality, and order. Tradition, in contrast, is associated with stagnation, underdevelopment, the Orient, conventional tools and technologies, poverty, superstition, and disorder (Gupta 1998).
Colonial knowledge production corresponds with Foucault’s “governmentality,” or the “art of government,” where power is the ability to impart knowledge in a way that means it is internalized as truth (Foucault 2007).4 In the Foucauldian sense, to be governed is not only to have a form imposed upon one’s existence, but to be given the terms within which existence will, and will not, be possible (Butler 2002). Colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it (Cohn 1996). Without understanding “precisely how the social domain has been restructured (constituted), our accounts of the dynamic connections between power and knowledge during the colonial period will remain limited” (Asad 1991, 324).5 This is important, since the colonial dichotomy of modernity and tradition continued in the postcolonial period through a new dichotomy of developed and underdeveloped (Gupta 1998, 9). After independence from colonial rule, India and Pakistan saw the post–World War II rise of the Bretton Woods Institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund) that institutionalized a global governmentality of development, where underdevelopment became a new form of identity for North Indians (Gupta 1998, ix).
Development is thus a highly contested and ambiguous term that carries several layers of meaning: an organized system of power and practice that has formed part of the West’s colonial and neocolonial domination of poorer countries; a form of “planned social change” that involves external intervention by one group in the affairs of another; the activities required to bring about change and progress often linked to economic growth; an adjective that implies there is a subjective standard against which different rates of progress may be compared (Lewis 2005, 474). Since it came into being in 1971, Western countries have perceived Bangladesh as a “bottomless basket case”—a country of poor and starving people (New York Times 1972). This image, along with those of famines (including the one in 1974–75) and floods, portrayed an inferior Other (Said 1979) that needed the superior expertise and funds of foreign donors and consultants to bring growth and progress—to “lift it up from poverty.” This “development industry” is “a powerful and complex constellation of public and private agencies channeling large amounts of international development assistance, including intergovernmental organizations of the United Nations, multilateral and bilateral donors such as the World Bank or the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and a vast array of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) ranging from small specialized, grassroots concerns to large transnational organizations such as Oxfam or the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)” (Lewis 2005, 473).
This longer history shows how Bangladesh has long been acted upon by both colonial administrators and foreign donor agencies. Misreading the Bengal Delta discusses the ways in which development in the context of aid projects in Bangladesh constitute a continuation of the preceding notions of progress and modernity used to justify interventions in its environment and society. This illustrates how external ideas, external institutions, and external resources shaped the current form of Bangladesh and its state—from the creation of colonial railways and World Bank embankments to its dependency on development funding allocated to poverty reduction, modern agriculture, and now climate change—rather than creating a system of citizen entitlements to reduce societal inequalities.
The priorities of the development industry may not match those of the people it is seeking to help. As anthropological studies of development have long shown, the latest development paradigms and donor priorities can be summed up with specific buzzwords that unlock funding and influence the direction of intervention (Cornwall 2007). Buzzwords include agricultural development (Ferguson 1990; Li 2007), gender (Cornwall and Eade 2010), participation (Harriss 1988; Cooke and Kothari 2001), and poverty reduction (Cornwall and Brock 2005). Such buzzwords are easily co-opted and reconfigured into “fuzzwords”—that is, they no longer contest the argument they may originally have challenged (Cornwall 2007). The vagueness of buzzwords is also a part of the anthropological critique of development, which shows how development projects, particularly at the World Bank, are made to appear disembedded from a historicized, politicized, and social context (Ferguson 1990; St. Clair 2006; Broad 2006; Goldman 2005).
Today, climate change adaptation has become one of the main development buzzwords (Barnes and Dove 2015). However, climate change is distinct from development buzzwords such as poverty reduction and gender empowerment. While ineffective development interventions may not have had the intended results (Ferguson 1990; Mosse 2005), the stakes were low since the interventions aimed to alleviate already poor situations. Yet the stakes of ineffective development interventions earmarked as climate funding is far higher as they should address actual environmental conditions and challenges so as to remediate climatic risk, rather than exacerbate it.
Climate Change and Capitalism
The misreading of the coastal landscape illustrates the entwinement of capitalist practices and development buzzwords. As this book shows, old forms of capitalist activities are continued in many development interventions now posing as climate related. This is a significant problem since the environmental challenges we face on a global scale today are inextricably linked to the advent of capitalism, which reduced both human beings and the natural environment to pure commodities. Political economist Karl Polanyi (1957) predicted such commodification would lead to the destruction of both. As political ecologists point out: “Environmental degradation is not an unfortunate accident under advanced capitalism, it is instead a part of the logic of that economic system” (Peet, Robbins, and Watts 2011, 26), where economic acceleration caused by late capitalism has resulted in considerable environmental overheating (Stensrud and Hylland Eriksen 2019).
Today, we are witnessing the most rapid and extensive destruction of biodiversity in human existence, a trend that has escalated since the Industrial Revolution. Climatic change arose from the unsustainable exploitation of nature in the name of profit and progress. Polanyi (1957, 42) further suggested that capitalism “was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of resources.” Herein lies the contradiction between capitalism and the environment. For capitalism to thrive, it requires endless natural resources. Yet, natural resources are finite (Soule, Carre, and Jackson 1990). The extraction and use of fossil fuels has resulted in greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to long-term climatic change through global warming. While some academics propose to call our current geological epoch the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the dominant force shaping the earth (Gan et al. 2017), others suggest that we call it the Capitalocene to highlight the system of power, profit, and re/production in capitalism and the way it has, and continues to be, entwined with the [use and abuse of the] environment (J. Moore 2016).
Indeed, in today’s focus on climatic change, rising sea levels, and extreme weather phenomena, there is sometimes a risk of neglecting how capitalism, based on the commodification of nature (land) and humans (labor), has contributed to global warming. In addition, capitalist land-use and industrial practices have also resulted in significant localized environmental degradation, including, but not limited to, pollution, water scarcity, soil acidification, deforestation, desertification, and salinization of once fertile lands. Those climate-related projects that are based on the same capitalist modes of production as in the past exacerbate environmental crises while diverting funds and attention away from where they might be most needed.
Furthermore, capitalism’s quest for profit leads to the expansion of technologies that seek to control and tame nature. The embankments of Bangladesh’s coastal zone embody such technological visions of control as they facilitate profit-oriented agriculture and aquaculture while enabling land-based transport such as railways and roads. The entanglement of embankments with the environment and with human livelihoods illustrates the ways in which environmental degradation is the result of modern land-use practice. This is a factor that is often lost in problem formulations that focus solely on global warming through greenhouse gas emissions, where mitigating policies are often reduced to CO2 caps and trading. But most importantly, we must be aware that climate change adaptation and mitigation can be harnessed by particular capitalist actors to continue with their existing and environmentally damaging activities.
Simplifying Floods and Embankments
Misreading the Bengal Delta begins by historicizing the World Bank’s current framing of flood-protection embankments as a new form of “climate adaptation infrastructure.” Drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it reveals how the ecological problems now associated with climate change, and the embankments that are proposed as its solution, both have their roots in an unfolding sequence of colonial initiatives dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Development portrayals of floods as being caused solely by rising sea levels is complicated by the fact that Bangladesh experiences three types of floods: borsha (annual monsoon rains), bonna (irregular destructive floods in the wake of cyclones, tidal surges, and storms) and jalabaddho (waterlogging, drainage congestion). The earliest embankments in the Sundarbans were not made to stop floods. They were temporary and made of earth to prevent the dry season incursion of saline tidewater: they were broken each year to support monsoon flooding, which colonial accounts lauded as a “blessing of fertility” for Bengal and the cost of repair was borne by the cultivators and landholders themselves (1770s–1850s).
However, under the centralized administration of the British Raj, the narrative shifted: all floods were viewed as damaging to life and property, which justified the creation of watertight embankments so as to reduce the costs of annual repairs. Not only did these new embankments not break, but railways and roads, crisscrossing the delta, were built on top of them to promote British military and economic interests. The imposition of a permanent infrastructure on top of a dynamic landscape interrupted the natural cycle of monsoon floods and silt deposits. Like the “schemes of improvement” described by James C. Scott (1998), embankments were cast as part of modernity and a vehicle for betterment. In reality, they oversimplified complex environmental and social processes and profoundly damaged the fragile coastal ecology. Similar to how “policymakers may have been misreading Kissidougou’s landscape by reading forest history backward” and wrongly blaming local villagers for deforestation and environmental destruction in Guinea (Fairhead and Leach 1996, 3), representations of Bangladesh’s climate change vulnerability also risk reading the coastal landscape backward by simplifying the complex and interlinked processes affecting Bangladesh’s southwest coastal zone.
This longer history of how permanent embankments in a dynamic eroding, accreting, and meandering delta highlights how efforts to prevent monsoon floods have had the unintended effect of increasing siltation in the southwest coastal zone of Bangladesh.6 Silt trapped in the canals and rivers makes the waterbodies shallow and reduces their water-retention capacity during the dry season, while raising the riverbed levels outside embankments. The difference in elevation traps rainwater inside the embankment, river water then overflows and the ensuing drainage congestion causes damaging floods called jalabaddho or waterlogging (Adnan 1994; Iqbal 2010). Thus, while many international experts argue that climate change causes floods in Bangladesh, floods in Bangladesh are not just about climate change.
To build flood-protection embankments as a form of adaptation to climate change may in fact only serve to worsen preexisting flood problems (Auerbach et al. 2015). A historical discussion of floods and embankments further illustrates the role of donor-funded development projects in shaping water management in southwest coastal Bangladesh. This contributes to existing scholarship on how managing water and the movements of water bodies in South Asian deltas impose artificial land-water separation (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2013; Mukhopadhyay 2017) while being deeply entangled in projects of state-making from the colonial period to today (Mosse 2003; D’Souza 2006; Bhattacharyya 2018).
Translating Climate Change
While this book begins with a critical analysis of embankments as adaptation, not all projects using climate change to attract donor funding exacerbate or ignore environmental problems. Various development brokers (specific donors, NGOs, consultants, and government agencies) use climate change to attract and legitimize funding for their particular development interventions. These projects simplify complex environmental processes, especially in deltaic waterscapes. They do this by rearranging events and outcomes to alter expectations of causality, thus making the interventions appear as if they were addressing climate change.7 They translate the metacode of climate change—a code that strips out context so that it appears neutral and universal in order to provide a space for resolving differences and carry out transnational negotiations (Rottenburg 2009, 142). Translation here refers to the processes by which development brokers produce “coherence”; that is, they make projects real by generating and translating interests, mutually enrolling supporters, and stabilizing interpretations and representations so as to match causal events to the prevailing project logic or policy theory (Mosse and Lewis 2006, 13; Mosse 2005, 9).8 The policy theory in Bangladeshi climate change projects tends to be climate reductive: the country will drown because of rising sea levels caused by global warming. “Climate reductive translations” thus help conceptualize how different climate projects produce coherence, creating causal narratives linking development interventions to the policy theory of climate change.
This approach is anchored in the anthropology of development that analyzes development as a practice of politics (Li 2007). It draws on “aidnographies,” or ethnographies of aid, where development is “not a coherent set of practices but a set of practices that produces coherence” (Yarrow 2011, 6). Power in development is not simply a hegemonic discourse forcing certain outcomes (Mosse 2011), but is a practice resulting from the actions of development professionals complicit in maintaining and reproducing dominant development narratives (Mosse 2005). Bangladeshi development professionals can be conceptualized as development brokers—social actors that actively build social, political, and economic roles rather than simply following normative scripts (Bierschenk, Chauveau, and de Sardan 2000; Mosse and Lewis 2006). Building on assemblage as a concept that captures how multiple parts form a whole (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 69), these Bangladeshi development brokers can be understood as partaking in “development assemblages” that constitute heterogeneous development actors (donors, NGOs, state units, consultants) that come together to create a common development project by translating climate change.
To illustrate the importance of brokerage in such development assemblages, I draw on ethnographic materials from development meetings, conferences, and interviews with researchers, NGO workers, and development professionals who work with climate-related aid-funded development projects in Bangladesh. Such an aidnography highlights how the development industry forms part of a “technical game”—a game that strips out context in order to resolve differences and carry out transnational negotiations between diverse actors with different interests, beliefs, and knowledge backgrounds. To participate in the technical game, Bangladeshi development brokers use climate change as a metacode (Rottenburg 2009, xxvi), or what they themselves refer to as “spice.” Their performativity helps explain the diversity of development project proposals and highlights the importance of analyzing the actors and networks that actively translate climate change to legitimize widely different project activities, such as those that generate rural employment, restore important local canals, and provide safe drinking water. This is a stark contrast to top-down projects such as large infrastructure projects (such as embankments) or export-oriented brackish aquaculture, which contributes to agrarian dispossession.
The concept of “climate reductive translations” thus centers on heterogeneous development brokers who are social actors with a high degree of agency, but who are structurally constrained by the funding paradigms of development donors (Long 2001). This focus on development brokerage nuances previous work suggesting that development discourse is internalized by development actors in ways that control and shape their thoughts and actions (Ferguson 1990, 18; Escobar 1995, 52) and complicates ideas of development as an “extremely efficient apparatus for producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power over, the Third World” (Escobar 1995, 9). Existing enquiries into this development–climate change nexus in Bangladesh have focused on English-speaking Western development professionals. For example, Jason Cons suggests that Bangladesh can be viewed as laboratory for donor-funded climate interventions best conceptualized as a Foucauldian “heterodystopia” (Cons 2018), while Kasia Paprocki proposes that the increased amount of climate funding in development has resulted in an “adaptation regime” that governs both people and landscapes in ways that results in agrarian dispossession and outmigration where climate change projects operate as an “anti-politics machine” (Paprocki 2018; 2016). Misreading the Bengal Delta contributes to this critical literature on climate change and development through its examination of brokerage undertaken by local Bangladeshi development professionals in climate-funded projects to better understand why climate-related projects can have such widely diverse interventions, aims, and outcomes both on the environment and society.
Climate Reductive Translations in Salt- and Freshwater Villages
The particular characteristics of each development assemblage helps explain the shape and form of widely different adaptation projects, such as saline tiger-prawn cultivation and intensive high-yield agriculture, that repackage longstanding interventions as climate solutions. The recasting of brackish-tiger-prawn cultivation as climate adaptation by foreign actors and research institutes in Bangladesh serves as another illustration of a climate reductive translation that is out of touch with the lived experiences of the landless poor. Tiger-prawn-related brokers translate climate change as the sole, or inevitable, cause of salinity in the coastal zone in order to legitimize the expansion of brackish shrimp aquaculture for exports. By doing so, they ignore how salinity is both seasonal and reversible and can be alleviated by temporary breaches during the monsoon and tidal river management, which may help enable longer agrarian futures.
Land-centric Marxist theories of accumulation and the privatization of common lands are difficult to apply in the analysis of tiger-prawn cultivation because of the Bengal delta’s fluid land- and waterscapes where the rights to water bodies are as important as, and often indistinguishable from, land rights. This results in multiple and more-than-economic dimensions of dispossession where the quality of water used in aquaculture matters. A gendered ethnography in the saltwater village of Lonanodi captures how suffering is used as an affective critique against saltwater practices and its devastating ecological effects—showing the relevance of emotional political ecologies to better understand shrimp aquaculture (Sultana 2011).9 Rather than being against capitalist land use practices, people in the embanked floodplain of Nodi are happy with export-oriented and capitalist crab and freshwater golda prawn production as these require fresh—not saline—water.
In Dhanmarti village, locals stopped tiger-prawn cultivation and returned to freshwater farming. Because salt reduced the soil fertility, they are now dependent on a package of agricultural technologies (intensive crop patterns, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and high-yield and high-value crops/seeds). These interventions formed part of the Green Revolution that American actors introduced to Bangladesh in the 1960s. Today, particular development assemblages, including USAID and the World Bank, are repackaging these same agricultural technologies as adaptation measures in most of Bangladesh using neo-Malthusian discourses. This image of Bangladesh as Malthusia (poor and starving because of a large population) is contested by local critiques of yield-centric modes of agriculture through technology. Such critiques are articulated through emic concepts such as shakti [strength, power, soil fertility] and bhejal [impure, adulterated, corrupted].
While anthropological critiques of Green Revolution technologies have generally focused on the symbolic dimensions of social change, the lived experience and materiality of shakti and bhejal illuminate the interlinkages between the environment, agriculture, and health. New interdisciplinary findings in biology and environmental anthropology on the importance of microorganisms for human health highlight the multispecies entanglements between environment, food, and humans—captured through local conceptualizations of shakti. Climate change adaptation projects that promote intensive agriculture fail to address historical lessons of soil degradation and biodiversity loss, while ignoring how weak institutional structures of enforcement contribute to an increasingly toxic landscape with health-harming foods. This focus on climate change in the development industry is thus at risk of failing rural society and ecology in southwest coastal Bangladesh in several ways: by funding unsustainable infrastructure, aquaculture, and agriculture that damage the local environment and weaken livelihood capacities by promoting capital-intensive technologies.
Misreading Coastal Vulnerabilities
Development projects not only simplify complex environmental processes by misreading the coastal landscape, they also misread coastal vulnerabilities in ways that do not always match the livelihood concerns of those they seek to help. On donor websites on climate-related development activities, several initiatives aim to “educate and train coastal communities” in Bangladesh to “build capacity” and “raise awareness” on natural resource and disaster risk management (USAID 2013). In light of the historic devastation brought on by cyclones, tidal waves, and storm surges, such disaster preparedness and shelters are important means to address a particular form of vulnerability of the biophysical coastal landscape. Notably, donors suggest that strengthening emergency preparedness is a means to reduce “coastal vulnerabilities,” where climatic change will increase the “vulnerability of coastal populations” and the poor in the Global South (World Bank 2018) that risks reversing the effects of development interventions to date (UNDP 2019). Indeed, donor projects tend to view women as especially vulnerable. For example, the UNDP’s (2019) climate adaptation project “Coping with Climate Risks by Empowering Women in Coastal Areas” is based on the idea that “women in the project area are highly vulnerable to climate change impacts given their limited access to resources and limited stake in decision-making. . . . Their dependency on degraded natural resources makes women especially vulnerable to diminished livelihoods and increased poverty.”
Such a narrow concept of vulnerability has been criticized for enabling paternalistic, patronizing, and controlling tendencies toward those groups in society deigned differentially vulnerable, thereby reproducing and ratifying vulnerability (Gilson 2016). It is also based on a very simplified understanding of gender dynamics in rural Bangladesh, illustrating a wider tendency of projects and recent development literature on gender and climate change to reproduce stereotyped ideas of women as particularly vulnerable, poor, and needing special attention (Arora-Jonsson 2011). This is a typical example of how emphasizing vulnerability can be employed to get decision-makers to pay attention and do the right thing, while obfuscating the agency, knowledge, and resilience of marginalized groups (Cuomo 2011, 695).
Designating vulnerability to different groups—as many development interventions in Bangladesh do—becomes a political decision that may entrench the very conditions that it seeks to alleviate by making that group accountable for their own precarious situation and thus indirectly justifying injustice (Butler 2014, 111). In this sense, the widespread use of the concept of vulnerability in the literature on adaptation and climate change has often been conflated with poverty and diluted the concept. It has gone from being an inherently critical concept to becoming a dehistoricized term used to describe a set of fixed conditions and thus fails to systematically address imposed social vulnerability (Crate and Nuttall 2009).
What is imposed social vulnerability? There seems to be a tendency to use vulnerability synonymously with precarity, which may result in both words losing their analytical purpose (Millar 2017; Runacres 2020). Social vulnerability could be seen as a form of “ontological precarity,” where anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015, 20) argues that precarity is the condition of our time in a world filled with indeterminacy and unpredictability. This condition of precariousness is quite different from precarity used to understand “the predicament of those who live at the juncture of unstable contract labor and a loss of state provisioning” (Han 2018, 331). The focus on loss of state provisioning in the term precarity captures a critique of contemporary capitalism and is linked to the concept of precariat, where workers in the West have come to lack benefits and securities once common before global outsourcing (Standing 2016). Yet workers have constantly been in precarious positions in the Global South: there were no labor rights in Bangladesh to dismantle to begin with. Instead, the precarity of work in Bangladesh—its insecurity and lack of stability—is arguably a demonstration of how global capital moves to low-income regions to exploit the lack of worker rights in countries that have not had an opportunity to develop them. Labor opportunities are sparse for the landless in Nodi, while the costs of healthcare, education, dowry, ghush (bribes), and microcredit result in unequal outcomes for the poor. This is further exacerbated by structural underemployment resulting in—and propagating—precarious work and uncertain livelihoods.
Thus, the development industry’s use of “coastal vulnerabilities” conflates the vulnerability of a particular place to climatic risk with the socioeconomic constraints of the people living there. Arguably, this is an example of an “antagonistic clash” between multiple vulnerabilities existing in the same context (Runacres 2020). Climate adaptation projects, like most development projects, are short and fleeting interventions that do little to remediate these widening socioeconomic inequalities in Bangladesh where the rich are becoming richer and the poor are becoming poorer. Moving away from the vulnerability of people in an area deemed by donors as climate vulnerable to understand everyday precarity arising from the long-term effects of donor-demanded structural adjustment policies illustrates how coastal vulnerabilities are fundamentally tied to inequality.
The macroeconomic effects of reducing the role of the state while targeting women in development projects have gendered effects that complicate narratives of poor Bangladeshi women as more vulnerable in an oppressive and patriarchal society. Structural inequality and everyday precarity of people in Nodi takes the form of women accumulating microfinance debt to afford education for their children, healthcare for their loved ones, dowries for their daughters, and even the labor and migration brokerage costs required to secure employment opportunities for their male family members. Providing a space for the livelihood concerns as they are articulated by landless earthworking women and their families in the embanked floodplain of Nodi sheds light on how misreading the coastal landscape also involves misreading the socioeconomic landscape.
Long-term ethnographic fieldwork with a historical outlook helps bring these complexities to light through the messy disjunctures of history and the voices of people so often neglected. It highlights the livelihood concerns of these people so that development funds may be redirected toward these ends. It is essential to add these perspectives to discussions of climate change, which otherwise tend to be dominated by natural science perspectives and scientific models based on assumptions that risk overlooking the intricate chains of causality behind the correlations they measure. Examination of the intersection of ecology, politics, and society in this aid-dependent “climate hotspot” reveals the flawed assumptions of Western development donors seeking to save an “inferior other.” By understanding how development projects misread climate change in such an unequal aid context, we are better able to identify, and thereby address, pressing livelihood problems such as the environmental degradation caused by embankments and saltwater tiger-prawn cultivation, reduced soil fertility, food becoming an adulterated commodity, and weak public institutions. This analysis of the knowledge production of climate change in the global development industry is relevant for other places in the Global South, particularly coastal communities facing floods and rising sea levels.