Preface

In the autumn of 2011, I met with Dr. Mohammed as I was finishing twelve months of qualitative research on an internationally funded water governance project in Bangladesh’s coastal zone. My field trips drew my attention to several urgent problems that our rural interlocutors had raised: from monoculture—such as saline tiger-prawn cultivation that weakened flood-protection embankments and destroyed the soil—to canals, which filled up with heavy sediment each year. The goal of that project, however, was to assess the operation and maintenance of the embankments and their sluice gates. I therefore had to exclude many of my findings about the contentiousness of infrastructure and land-use practices. I sought to explore these issues further in a new project and began asking fellow researchers I met during the year, such as Dr. Mohammed, how to best pursue this. When I mentioned my interest in land use and siltation as we sat in Gulshan—Dhaka’s fanciest neighborhood, bustling with international development professionals—he commented on the increasing amount of financial support for climate change research and proposed that the title of my research proposal ought to mention climate change.

Although I followed this advice, I wondered whether this inclusion of climate change deflected attention away from the most pressing concerns that arose during my previous study. Climate change has become a buzzword used to attract donor funding, but to what extent do climate-funded projects address coastal vulnerabilities and needs? This book investigates climate change knowledge production in development aid projects. How does the idea of climate change shape the direction of development interventions in the Global South? To what extent do these interventions correspond with the concerns of the populations they seek to help?

I returned to Bangladesh in August 2014 to further explore these questions. I conducted twelve months of multisited, interdisciplinary fieldwork, concluding in July 2015. I spent a total of six months in the southwest coastal zone of Bangladesh, mainly in an embanked floodplain (“Nodi,” a pseudonym) in Khulna District, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork: participant observation, ethnographic interviews, oral histories, and household surveys. I first conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with development professionals in Dhaka (the capital) and Khulna city during the monsoon period. This was followed by ethnographic fieldwork in Nodi for three months, where I spent time with two groups of landless women doing earthwork—repairing small roads in a donor-funded rural employment scheme—and getting to know their families, who were living in different places throughout Nodi. I also visited tiger-prawn cultivation areas in Satkhira District and conducted archival research in Dhaka and Khulna city. I returned to Nodi in May and June 2015 where I conducted a qualitative household survey among a total of four hundred households in two different administrative units (Dhanmarti and Lonanodi), employing two different landless earthworking women as my field assistants. I spent July 2015 in Dhaka, where I conducted follow-up interviews with development professionals and academics.

Both before and after my fieldwork in Bangladesh, I conducted archival research and literature reviews of the Indian Office Records and Private Papers in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room and the Maps Reading Room at the British Library, the SOAS Library, and the Anthropology Library at the British Museum. In April 2015, I spent three weeks at the National Archives of Bangladesh (NAB), the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), and the Divisional Library of Khulna. Through this archival research, I found a wealth of historical documents on embankments, changes in agriculture, irrigation, labor, and demographics from a variety of sources specific to the Khulna District and the southwest coastal region. It helped unveil continuities and divergences of commercial and environmental change (railroads, early embankments, other industries) and the colonial narratives of progress (e.g., railways, embankments, artificial irrigation, and “modernized” agriculture). Maps, censuses, and cadastral lists are compiled by the state to simplify and grasp complex realities (Scott 1998, 44). These archival objects thus capture the models and language of decisionmakers at a particular time and must be treated as ethnographic data (Shore and Wright 1997). I therefore critically engage with these sources and discuss this in-depth throughout this book.