Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh
Forthcoming from Cornell University Press December 2021
Bangladesh dominates mainstream narratives of climate disaster. Frequently described as the ‘world’s most vulnerable country to climate change’, the oversimplified specter of a major country slipping underwater has yielded a crisis narrative that erases a complex history of landscape transformation and intense, contemporary political conflicts. Colonialism, capitalism, and local agrarian struggles have so far shaped the country’s coastline more than carbon emissions. Today, both national and global elites ignore this history, while crafting narratives and economic strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities in the name of climate adaptation.
The resulting adaptation regime is building a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable—a far cry from climate justice. For the country’s rural poor, this adaptation regime entails dispossession from agrarian livelihoods and outmigration from rural communities to urban centers. As this shift contributes to increased production of export commodities such as garments and frozen shrimp, the threat of climate change and its associated migrations is reframed as an opportunity for old-fashioned economic development and growth. A powerful peasant movement is resisting these trends, but their struggle is hampered by oversimplified discourses of climate emergency.
The book draws on over two years of multi-sited ethnographic and archival fieldwork with development practitioners, policy makers, scientists, farmers and rural migrants, to investigate the politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh from multiple perspectives and scales, offering an in-depth analysis of the global politics of climate change adaptation and how they are both forged and manifested in this unique site.
My research is broadly concerned with political economies and ecologies of development, and the social movements that address them. I employ a variety of qualitative research tools in my work, including critical ethnography, archival, and participatory methods. Since 2006, I have worked with Nijera Kori, Bangladesh's largest landless social movement, an engagement that motivates many of my research questions.
My work has benefited from collaborations and affiliations with a range of different institutions. I have been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, a Visiting Researcher at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, and affiliated with the Global Change Program at Jadavpur University in Kolkata.
Forthcoming from Cornell University Press December 2021
Bangladesh dominates mainstream narratives of climate disaster. Frequently described as the ‘world’s most vulnerable country to climate change’, the oversimplified specter of a major country slipping underwater has yielded a crisis narrative that erases a complex history of landscape transformation and intense, contemporary political conflicts. Colonialism, capitalism, and local agrarian struggles have so far shaped the country’s coastline more than carbon emissions. Today, both national and global elites ignore this history, while crafting narratives and economic strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities in the name of climate adaptation.
The resulting adaptation regime is building a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable—a far cry from climate justice. For the country’s rural poor, this adaptation regime entails dispossession from agrarian livelihoods and outmigration from rural communities to urban centers. As this shift contributes to increased production of export commodities such as garments and frozen shrimp, the threat of climate change and its associated migrations is reframed as an opportunity for old-fashioned economic development and growth. A powerful peasant movement is resisting these trends, but their struggle is hampered by oversimplified discourses of climate emergency.
The book draws on over two years of multi-sited ethnographic and archival fieldwork with development practitioners, policy makers, scientists, farmers and rural migrants, to investigate the politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh from multiple perspectives and scales, offering an in-depth analysis of the global politics of climate change adaptation and how they are both forged and manifested in this unique site.
My research is broadly concerned with political economies and ecologies of development, and the social movements that address them. I employ a variety of qualitative research tools in my work, including critical ethnography, archival, and participatory methods. Since 2006, I have worked with Nijera Kori, Bangladesh's largest landless social movement, an engagement that motivates many of my research questions.
My work has benefited from collaborations and affiliations with a range of different institutions. I have been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, a Visiting Researcher at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, and affiliated with the Global Change Program at Jadavpur University in Kolkata.