Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh

by Camelia Dewan, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Foreword)

Perilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Yet, to what extent do adaptation projects address local needs and concerns? Combining environmental history and ethnographic fieldwork with development professionals, rural farmers, and landless women, Misreading the Bengal Delta critiques development narratives of Bangladesh as a ?climate change victim.? It examines how development actors repackage colonial-era modernizing projects, which have caused severe environmental effects, as climate-adaptation solutions. Seawalls meant to mitigate against cyclones and rising sea levels instead silt up waterways and induce drainage-related flooding. Other adaptation projects, from saline aquaculture to high-yield agriculture, threaten soil fertility, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Bangladesh's environmental crisis goes beyond climate change, extending to coastal vulnerabilities that are entwined with underemployment, debt, and the lack of universal healthcare.

This timely book analyzes how development actors create flawed causal narratives linking their interventions in the environment and society of the Global South to climate change. Ultimately, such misreadings risk exacerbating climatic threats and structural inequalities.

Misreading the Bengal Delta is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Genres: Bangladesh, Asia

254 pages, Hardcover

Published March 29, 2022

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an important book in development studies that interrogates the narratives and ideologies informing climate adaptation in Bangladesh, an area that acts as an 'aid lab' for new forms of developments. The book explores how narratives of sea-level related salination justify political economy changes in coastal regions of Bangladesh that serve to dispossess the local populations and cause damage to the environment. The salination comes from embankments rather than rising sea-levels Dewan argues that development practitioners participate in 'climatic reductionist translations' where causality is placed with climate rather than other contextual factors due to the the fashions in development funding.

This book complements the works of Kasia Paprocki and Jason Cons well and is an absolute must read for anyone interested in development and the environment.

[DM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really excellent intervention. The argument about climate change as a meta code as well as climate change reductive thinking was really strong, but I also appreciated the section on gender roles, masculinity, and the focus on health vulnerabilities + adulterated food. The one thing that was a little unclear was the book's critique of accumulation by dispossession and primitive accumulation (I don't know if the fact that the state is internally contradictory and heterogenous really undermines the overall point of ABD, or that in one area waters remained a commons despite export oriented activities etc.). There's also a little bit of internal contradiction here about the role of the state. Overall though a must-read and I really wonder how many academics need to write books challenging climate change victim narratives before there is real change in the media framing/public perception etc.

[Jimmy J. Crantz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not entirely sure where I stand in my thoughts about the book. I think she makes several interesting and valid points, but I don’t always feel that she succeeds in conveying them. (It took quite far into the book before I think I began to understand how embankments contributed to the salinity of the soil.) It was probably largely thanks to our lecturer that I was able to put the book into context.

I also feel quite distant from the people described in the book. Perhaps more images and explanations would have been helpful for a reader unfamiliar with the subject.

[Sagarika · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you say you care about climate change and don’t care about dismantling class structures, you can just say you enjoy gardening!