TheDaak review

Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh by Camelia Dewan, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2021, Paperback, 245 Pages, ISBN: 9780295749617, US$30

By Md Rahamatullah

Geographically, Bangladesh is situated in a unique location which is very disaster-prone. It is home to three river systems- the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna. Due to its geological characteristics, studying Bangladesh through climate change has become a dominant methodology for scholars, development agencies, Government Organizations (GOs), and International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs). Bangladesh introduced a ‘Ground Zero’ for climate catastrophe^, which portrays it as a ‘basket case’ and is used as a laboratory for development practices. This climate catastrophe is justified by its ecological and demographic characteristics: Bangladesh is a highly populated delta near the Bay of Bengal. It has led to the understanding that Bangladesh will turn into a climate refugee because of the rising sea level, as low-lying areas will drown, and people will flee due to floods. Is this the only storyline behind Bangladesh? 

In Misreading the Bengal Delta, Camelia Dewan presents different stories about Bangladesh’s climate change. She discusses how development discourse and climate change are produced and how it impacts the people in the coastal area of Sundarbans. Dewan convincingly discloses the larger political economy of climate change in Bangladesh. The state and various donor agencies come into contact to implement various policies in coastal Bangladesh and represent it as “capitalist assemblages” of various NGOs, donor agencies, and development organisations to achieve capitalist motive (p. 97). This book is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork. She uses ethnography work in the South West coastal zone on the Bangladesh side of the Sundarbans. As a field site, she works in Khulna and Satkhira districts. In her works, she uses participant observations, in-depth interviews, and oral histories along with archival research. She conducts fieldwork with landless women, farmers (especially shrimp farmers), various donor agencies, policymakers, and research consultants. Through her ethnographic works, she develops a conceptual framework of ‘climate reductive translations’ (p. xi).  This conceptual framework shows ‘… 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’ (p. 4). 

This book has seven chapters, including  an introduction and a conclusion; the remaining five are the main chapters. The title of the first chapter is “Simplifying Embankments”. Here, she gives an environmental history of the coastal area of Bangladesh. It deals with contemporary climate change adaptation debates by historicising the British colonial intervention in the coastal area of Sundarbans. In this chapter, Dewan argues that the embankment project was undertaken long before climate change. This embankment project is identified as a ‘development problem for Bangladesh’ (p. 46). ‘Development brokers’ such as donors, NGOs, consultants, and government bodies portrayed flood as the cause of climate change, wherein embankment is the only solution. By contrast, Dewan says the embankment project is a problem. It creates water logging, one of the major causes of floods in the coastal Sundarbans.

The title of the second chapter is ‘Translating Climate Change’. I found this is the most important chapter where she critically deals with the politics of climate change knowledge production. Here, she uses ‘reductionism’ as a conceptual framework and fits it into climate change as a ‘climate reductive translation’. She refers to ‘translation’ as how development brokers make their project real and logical for generating their own interest… “that is, create causal narratives linking development interventions to the policy theory of climate change” (p. 50).  Through this approach, development brokers simplified all projects under the umbrella of climate change. They use climate change as the ‘most amazing spice’ (masala) (p. 55) and as a ‘metacode’ (p. 61). All the projects like poverty alleviation, emancipation of women, and embankment projects were converted into climate change projects. As a ‘spice’ or ‘metacode’, climate change helps to attract donor funding. This process also helps the development brokers to get access to the state’s various policies, agenda formation, and implementation.

In the third chapter, “Assembling Fish, Shrimp, and Suffering in a Saltwater Village”, and the fourth chapter, “Entangling Rice, Soil, and Strength in a Freshwater Village”, Dewan talks about shrimp farming and high-yield agricultural produce and the use of toxic pesticides in the field. In the saltwater village, government and developmental agencies promote brackish aquaculture as a part of ‘the blue revolution’ (p. 80). In the 1980s, the Bangladesh government, along with foreign funds, promoted the shrimp industry as ‘white gold’ (p. 80). Various NGOs and government agencies encouraged shrimp farming as a climate change adaptation tool for the people. People mostly prefer the intrusion of saline water from the river, which is considered ideal for shrimp farming.  Given this situation, shrimp farming is one of the major causes for increasing salinity levels in the water bodies and soil in the Sundarbans region. Dewan argues that development brokers do not focus on it because of the larger political economy of shrimp cultivation. Some people are also against shrimp cultivation. As a part of the green revolution, the coastal people of Sundarbans (particularly in freshwater villages) focus on paddy cultivation. Here also, developmental agencies are cleverly destroying this area’s soil and environment. They use ‘climate reductive translation of food security and higher yield as adaptation tool’ (p. 125). They directly and indirectly encourage modern technology, artificial irrigation, chemicals, hybrid seeds, and fertilisers. The introduction of modern technology in the agricultural sector with the intensification of commercialisation in agriculture has turned the environment and food into commodities (p. 126). This is how development brokers destroy the ecology, environment, and agriculture through climate change adaptation policy in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. Jeson Cons (2018) also stated the same. In Bangladesh, donor agencies’ climate adaptation can be conceptualised as a Foucauldian conception of ‘heterodystopia’ – a concept that Cons offers as a means to analytically diagnose the relationships between these spaces and imaginations of a dystopian future to come. Likewise, Paprocki and Huq (2018) argue that funding in climate change creates an ‘adaptation regime,’ a socially and historically specific configuration of power that governs the landscape of possible intervention in the face of climate change. It is primarily built on a vision of development where urbanisation and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable. This ‘adaptation regime’ governs the landscape of the deltaic Sundarbans and its people, which entails agrarian disposition and migration. On the other hand, climate change projects are treated like anti-political machines. 

In chapter five, “Surviving Inequality,” Dewan discusses mostly how NGO intervention presents local people as ‘beneficiaries’ despite facing constant threats of natural disasters and man-made disasters. She argues that the people of this area are vulnerable to climate change and various levels of precarity, such as economic polarisation among the people and patriarchal oppression that oppresses women.

Dewan is one of the pioneers who is working on the discourse of climate change in the Bangladesh side of Sundarbans. I was brought up in the village of Sundarbans. I never thought about the politics of developmental interventions. This book has helped me think critically about the scholarship of climate change and development in Sundarbans.  Yet, this book has some shortcomings. This book is mainly based on the lower delta regions. I do not want to say this is a shortcoming, but it has further scope to explore more on upper delta and politics of climate change and development discourse. As a person belonging to  the Sundarbans area, I have observed that Dewan successfully did not touch upon the class relations and the impact of climate change and development discourse. She mainly focused on only poor women. There exist multiple classes in this area. The level of vulnerability is not the same for all classes of people in the Sundarbans area.  Also, I politely disagree with her when she says in the fifth chapter that people are extremely vulnerable in this area. Their resilience capacities are notable in everyday life as they constantly face or encounter the negative impact of salinity from paddy fields to drinking water, frequent storms and cyclones, high tidal surges of saline water,  extreme scarcity of usable water and the overall negative impact of climate change. In such challenging circumstances, they still find a way to survive in that place by learning how to adapt to every given situation. They are continuously making their habitat and building their life with the rhythm of the place. Without taking into account all those facts, it is too simple to say the people of the coast are vulnerable.

Another thing of  interest to me in this book is that the author is vehemently critical of the dominant discourse of climate change and development brokers, arguing that development brokers use climate change as a spice for attracting donor agencies. Yet she says, “I used climate change as a masala (spice) and obtained several funding offers for my research” (p. 55). She seems to be weaponising the climate change discourse by clapping with the development discourse in her scholarship. Nonetheless, Dewan’s work is very significant. Her work on climate change in coastal areas is an exercise on structural violence of knowledge production because she is against the dominant developmental scholarship of climate change in Sundarbans. She does not want to put her scholarship on climate change in the development brokers’ shoes. Her scholarship on climate change goes beyond how the development regime defines climate change. Finally, I would like to propose an area of further interest. In her work, she shows how a hegemonic structural policy is constructed through the state and various international agencies. I wonder if only the local people of Khulna division make solidarity within and among themselves, then what kind of strategic policies can emerge in the climate change and development discourse in the Sundarbans delta?