‘Climate Change as a Spice’: Brokering Environmental Knowledge in Bangladesh’s Development Industry

Abstract

This article examines whether the use of climate change as a 'spice' in order to attract donor funding may instead exacerbate existing environmental problems. The World Bank's latest adaptation project in coastal Bangladesh aims to create higher and wider embankments against rising sea levels. This disregards a long history of how embankments, by stopping beneficial monsoon inundations, result in dying rivers and damaging floods that devastate rural livelihoods. Bangladeshi 'development brokers' must therefore balance their roles as project employees supporting embankments as adaptation, and as locals knowledgeable about their harmful effects. The article shows how donors, NGOs, consultants and government bodies with different agendas, priorities and knowledge backgrounds 'translate' climate change to legitimise their activities. It contributes to debates about the politics of environmental knowledge production by arguing that development brokerage helps explain why some climate adaptation projects increase environmental vulnerability, while others address local needs.

Salinity and food security in southwest coastal Bangladesh: impacts on household food production and strategies for adaptation

“…Lastly, it is worth highlighting how our findings, which seek to provide socio-economic context for agricultural interventions to address salinity, simultaneously echo the cautionary conclusions of recent critical scholarship on climate change adaptation and development. These studies, many of which have unsurprisingly focused on Bangladesh, link adaptation and development efforts to such consequences as increasing socio-economic disparities, fueling agrarian dispossession, and exacerbating existing environmental problems (Dewan, 2020;Paprocki, 2018, andSovacool, 2018). Sovacool's investigation into the political ecology of climate adaptation in Bangladesh, for example, documented processes of rural and urban land-grabbing by elites ("enclosure"), majoritarian and authoritarian decision-making ("exclusion"), degradation of environmental commons ("encroachment"), and further disempowerment of marginalized groups ("entrenchment") in the design and implementation of various national and coastal adaptation policies (Sovacool, 2018).…”

Climate change reception studies in anthropology

“…Astrid Stensrud (2019), writing about an adaptation program in the Peruvian Andes, notes that encounters among different knowledges often fail, and might be better understood as “disencounters” that can exacerbate inequalities and depoliticize climate change by silencing its connections with inequality and poverty. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bangladesh, Camelia Dewan (2020, p. 13) examines the “strategic maneuvering” of development brokers, finding that competing knowledges can co‐exist in a single person, sometimes manifesting in linguistic codeswitching. Georgina Endfield (2011) draws attention to the historical work of British geographer and meteorologist Gordon Manley, who particularized climate and infused studies of meteorology with culturally specific and spatially varied dimensions in post‐war Britain, which has renewed significance as these particularities are increasingly being erased and replaced by the scientific metanarrative of global climate change.…”

Routledge Handbook of Autocratization in South Asia

“…These choices have incentivized saline water intrusion, corruption, displacement and exploitation of landless people, and other risk multipliers that also increase floods and cyclone danger. Yet, plans continuously present embankments as protective, and now promote them as climate adaptation (Dewan, 2020).…”