Misreading the Bengal Delta

Front matter

Misreading the Bengal Delta

Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh

Camelia Dewan Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Foreword

For several decades, Bangladesh has been the destination for internationally designed and funded interventions to bring economic and social development into a country rocked by war, buffeted by severe storms along its coastline, and challenged by political instability in a struggle to establish democracy and better futures for its citizens. At various points such programs have targeted rural credit, the empowerment of women, and small-scale industries, often leading to the proliferation of regional and international NGOs across the country (see Bornstein 2005; Shehabuddin 2008; Karim 2011; Julia Huang 2020). Camelia Dewan shows in this clearly argued study based on sustained fieldwork with farmers, fishers, and development experts that climate change has become the latest lens through which development possibilities and plans are now viewed in many parts of Bangladesh.

Development programs have a long and controversial history of seeing the landscape they wish to transform through a particular cosmopolitan perspective—one that is shaped globally and expected to be meaningful in all local situations. Growing concern about anthropogenic climate change and its likely adverse effects in vulnerable places has generated its own all-consuming, parallel discourse. Dewan joins a growing scholarship identifying a configuration of power in development enterprises and policy that shapes interventions considered possible in the face of climate change.’ Drawing on ethnographies of aid and development brokerage, she develops the concept of “climate reductive translations” to capture how knowledge and technocratic consensus on climate change is produced and deployed to affect the lives of poor people in coastal Bangladesh in distinctly different ways.

As Dewan notes, low-lying areas of coastal Bangladesh, sandwiched between the occasionally turbulent sea in the Bay of Bengal and the rivers draining into it, are familiar with the floods, storm surges, and cyclones that periodically shift the course of rivers, deposit sediment, dissolve small islands, sink fishing boats, and inundate paddy fields. Land captured from silt deposits is also lost to unruly waters when embankments breach or when sea levels rise: as tidal waves or as the more gradual ingress of saltwater into intertidal zones. To some extent, the xi xii Foreword more frequent disturbances and the havoc they create have been attributed to a monsoon season that has become less predictable and more extreme (Amrith 2018). This is often understood as the outcome of climate change.

After providing a dynamic history of flood control embankments that take the story back to colonial encounters with rivers in the Bengal delta, Dewan situates this fine study in two coastal villages: one dealing with saltwater ingress and the other confronting freshwater excess. The vulnerability and struggle for viable livelihoods in these coastal villages is examined through clear-eyed ethnography.

The southwestern coastal zone has undergone several transformations in recent decades. For example, in the late twentieth century, some farmers in this region grew rice, sometimes combining it with freshwater shrimp cultivation and adapting the rotation to the seasonal monsoon. Intensive shrimp farming increased the precarity of this economy, making it more vulnerable to price fluctuations and extreme weather disruptions (Paul and Rasid 1993). In the twenty-first century, some have argued that coastal sea-level rise has frequently inundated fields with brackish water (Chen and Mueller 2018). Camelia Dewan, however, documents how salinity is introduced into fields via embankments that are purposefully broken for the cultivation of brackish tiger prawns. She also looks beyond the specific villages in which she carries out her detailed investigation to provide an ethnography of the workings of the development industry through a close examination of its institutions, which operate from outside and beyond the village to contribute to the exacerbation of rural vulnerability.

To do this, she investigates how an itinerant community of NGO workers, development consultants, and government officials—development brokers— translate the life and challenges of these villages into what she conceptualizes as the metacode of climate change. These mediators decipher the shifting priorities of the development industry and find ways to attract its funds to these areas, which have been characterized as the frontlines for fighting climate change in South Asia and the Global South more generally. Along the way, tiger-prawn cultivation and rice farming are subject to the logic of climate change adaptation, having already been shaped by prior development projects and investments.

The ethnography also reveals how villagers, across class and ecological differences, and women in particular, perceive the threats to their homes and livelihoods from both the inclemency of weather and the vagaries of development projects. Dewan joins a rich tradition of scholarship on how development projects misrecognize the people and landscapes they choose to engineer and transform. She is also pioneering how these approaches can be deployed in the study of climate change adaptation and mitigation projects where the focus shifts from

Foreword xiii extracting the most from the land and labor to defending the land and residents from cataclysmic events seen as the consequence of nature unbound and unleashed by human endeavor gone awry. The result is a nuanced, analytically sharp account that listens closely to coastal villagers and comments astutely on those who would alter their lives in the name of promoting climate change resilience in rural coastal Bangladesh.

In the latter part of the book, Dewan takes the analysis outward to the larger questions of persistent inequality and vulnerability in coastal Bangladesh. She brings the larger story back to the relative absence of reliable state programs. The reliance of these coastal areas on fitful NGO projects, and their being subject to the enduring structural violence of poverty, inadequate health care, and vicious cycles of debt aggravated by proliferating credit schemes operated by NGOs, is powerfully narrated. However, she also listens carefully to the women villagers and the way they see pathways out of their suffering and precarity. The perspectives of villagers on food, health, fishing, farming, kinship, and migration shine through the text, providing a vivid description of the place and its location amid the turbulent waters of coastal zones facing climate change.

These accounts place in relief some of the obtuseness and insensitivity of climate change-related projects. Dewan situates the solutions to climate change vulnerability in coastal Bangladesh in a history of development that dates back to the Structural Adjustment Policies of the 1980s and the successor programs of microcredit and agrarian enterprise that left the poor exposed, women marginalized, and the whole region at the mercy of growing climate instability. She provides an original contribution to the ethnographic study of climate change-related development projects in the Global South.

K. Sivaramakrishnan Yale University

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

XV xvi Preface 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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has been a decade in the making, and countless people and institutions have helped me along the way. Although this list is not exhaustive, Iam immensely grateful to you all. Misreading the Bengal Delta could not have been written without my applied research experience and I am thankful to Aditi Mukherjee and Marie-Charlotte Buisson for introducing me to polders more than a decade ago and for giving me so much independence in conducting critical qualitative research. Without this, the contextual knowledge to conduct this ethnographic research would not have been possible. I am deeply grateful for the vast amount of support and help that Bangladeshi colleagues and their institutions provided, helping me to understand the social and environmental complexities of Bangladesh over the years. I would especially like to thank friends and colleagues in Khulna city and Dhaka. As promised, I have disguised your identities as much as possible: Sanvi, Gaurav, and Hossain have shared much time and wisdom with me. I owe my greatest debt to my interlocutors in Nodi for their kind generosity and openness to share their lives with me—without your time and support this book would not have been possible. Fupu, may you rest in peace—I am so glad and so privileged you shared your wisdom with me. Sadhu Kaka (Sage Uncle), I hope I can give this book to you in person—you taught me so much about aushtomashi bandhs and agriculture.

I was able to conduct the research for this book between 2013 and 2017 through a generous interdisciplinary and intercollegiate grant funded by the Bloomsbury Consortium. It helped facilitate collaboration between Birkbeck College and SOAS University of London during this time. The writing up of my research was supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award. I am thankful to Sunil Amrith for pushing me to expand and engage with history, teaching me how to do archival research, introducing me to key historical texts on the Sundarbans and the Bengal delta, and giving me the opportunity to do research in Bangladesh for the European Research Council “Coastal Frontiers” project. His guidance greatly shaped the thinking behind this book, even when moving from Birkbeck to Harvard to Yale. I am grateful to Penny Vera-Sanso at the Department of Geography, Environment, and xvii xviii Acknowledgments

Development Studies (GEDS) at Birkbeck for always challenging me and pushing me to further clarify my thinking and arguments. I am indebted to David Mosse at the Department of Anthropology at SOAS for his unwavering support and regular intellectual guidance. His work on development brokerage and our conversations over the years have continued to inspire and encourage me. This book would not have taken the form it has today without him.

Thanks also to Katy Gardner at the London School of Economics and Political Science and James Fairhead at the University of Sussex for their careful reading and valuable engagement with earlier drafts of this manuscript. Our thought-provoking discussions and their instructive and detailed feedback is greatly appreciated. Sincere thanks to Annu Jalais and Jason Cons for their valuable comments and suggestions that helped strengthen the coherence of my arguments and more clearly engage with wider scholarly debates on Bengal, colonial water infrastructure, and critiques of aid-funded climate projects. I am grateful to the editorial and marketing teams at the University of Washington Press, especially K. Sivaramakrishnan, Lorri Hagman, and Christopher Pitts for their careful reading and constructive suggestions. Heartfelt thanks to Tracey Heatherington for her enthusiasm for my research and for giving me the friendly push I needed to work on my book proposal.

The Birkbeck School of Social Sciences and GEDS have generously supported conference grants to present this research at the Annual Association of American Geographers (2016) and the Nordic Geographer’s Meeting (2017). Thanks to Frank Trentman and Hilary Sapire at the Department of History, Birkbeck, for constructive comments on my historical work. A special thanks to SOAS— the Department of Social Anthropology, the Doctoral School, and the SOAS Library—especially to Stephen Hughes, Ed Simpson, and Catherine Dolan for their critical remarks on my research proposal and its ethical implications. Thanks to Shahana Bajpaie at Languages of South Asia for her excellent Bengali classes that enabled me to converse fluently with my interlocutors. I would like to thank Caroline Osella for her critical reading and advice on the gendered aspects of my research and Elizabeth Hull for her valuable insights and suggestions on environmental and food-related topics. Thanks especially to Christopher Davies for her guidance and poignant insights that helped me collect and organize my fieldwork impressions into chapters and, ultimately, this book. Thanks also to Harry West and Jakob Klein for introducing me to the anthropology of food. I am thankful to my fellow colleagues at SOAS for providing valuable feedback and critical engagement on earlier drafts, particularly Tung-Yi Kho, Petra Matijevick and Helen Underhill, as well as Thomas van Der Molen, Leo Pang,

Acknowledgments xix

I am deeply grateful to Elisabeth Schober for her unwavering mentoring and granting me the possibility to work on this manuscript during my research fellowship at the University of Oslo (Norwegian Research Council grant number 275204/Fro). I am especially grateful to my remaining “Lifecycle of Container Ships” colleagues Johanna Markkula and Camilla Mevik for their support and the time they spent reading and commenting on several earlier drafts of chapter 2. All of my colleagues at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo have been wonderful with their constant collegial support, encouragement, and guidance, including the members of the three departmental research groups: Anthropology of Toxicity, Political Ecologies, and Offshoring Anthropology. Iam grateful to SAI colleagues past and present for our inspiring discussions, intellectual collaborations, and for the ways you have introduced me to new concepts and ideas. Special thanks to Lena Gross and Maria Guzman-Gallegos for introducing me to chemo-ethnographies and who, together with Cecilia Salinas, introduced me to their decolonial thinking seminars. Thanks to Wenzel Geissler, Ruth Prince, and their PhD students Signe Mikkelsen, Christian Medaas, Samwell Moses Ntapanta, Konstantin Biehl, and Franziska Klaas for active thought-provoking debates—showing the many similarities between South Asia and East Africa. A special thanks to Nefissa Naguib and Marianne Lien for always being so supportive and creative, and inspiring me to excel. Thanks to SAT’s Professor IIs: Penny Harvey for thought-provoking conversations and reflections on my work and Laura Ogden for stimulating workshops and hands-on professional advice. Thanks to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Knut Nustad, Keir Martin, Matthew Tomlinson, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and Theodoros Rakopolous for stimulating conversations and hands-on advice. Special thanks to Rune Flikke for the institutional importance given to decolonizing academia and supporting early career researchers.

I have received continual support throughout the years from colleagues at various conferences, panels, and seminars. I want to thank Paige West, Vigdis Broch-Due, Marco Armiero, Andrea Nightingale, Ivana Macek and Arild Ruud for inviting me to present my drafts at their departmental seminars. The participants also provided important and critical suggestions that have helped shape the current manuscript, especially Veronica Davidov for useful feedback on structure and Arne Kaijser for pushing me on the military aspect of colonial railways. I also want to thank Tom Widger for inviting me to participate in his workshop Toxic Legacies and Global Pollutants, where I received much useful xx Acknowledgments feedback on the agricultural aspects of my research, especially from Ben Campbell and David Arnold. Thanks to Sophie Haines for inviting me to the workshop “Negotiating Environment Knowledges” at the University of Oxford and the participants for their engagement with an earlier draft of chapter 2. Thanks also to the SOAS Food Studies Centre for inviting me to present at their postgraduate workshop and providing critical reflections and suggestions, particularly Katharina Graf, Anna Cohen, Brandi Simpson, and Francesca Vaghi, as well as Mukta Das, Megan Larmer, and Zofia Boni. I am grateful to Daniel and Ursula Münster for engaging me in collaborations on soil and microorganisms, as well as more-than-human anthropology, which has enriched chapter 4.

During the years, I have spent much time researching and teaching at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and appreciate the friendly, social atmosphere there. I am thankful to Siri Schwabe, Hege Leivestad, Gabriella Körling, Tomas Cole, the late Heidi Moksnes, Johan Lindquist, Mark Graham, and Helena Wulff for constructive feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts. A special thanks to Bengt Karlsson, Shahram Khoshravi, and Annika Rabo for publicly engaging with my work on climate reductionism and migration at Stockholm University’s Sustainability Forum in 2019. I am thankful to LSE Development Studies, particularly to the late Thandika Mkandawire, Kate Meagher, and Stuart Corbridge for their critical teachings on development and structural adjustment policies, which have shaped my own thinking in the past decade and were crucial for the last chapter of this book. I am also thankful to Rudra Sil for inspiring me to pursue an academic career through creating intellectually stimulating experiences at the University of Pennsylvania and for being the first to introduce me to James C. Scott and Karl Polanyi.

Iam grateful to the staff at the British Library, the Indian Office Records and Maps divisions, and the National Archives of Bangladesh for their valuable help in locating historical records, and to Patricia Saunders for her support in navigating these historical sources and for her critical insights on Bengal rivers. Thanks to Iftekhar Iqbal and the librarians at the National Archives of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, and Khulna divisional library for supporting me with my archival research. I am thankful to the photographer Probal Rashid for permitting me to use his striking photograph for the front cover of this book, to Ata Mojlish for his artistic help, and to Ben Pease for making such wonderful maps. A special thanks to the late Hugh Brammer for his detailed readings and critical comments on embankments, siltation, and salinity. We did not always agree, but Hugh’s Physical Geography of Bangladesh and his insistence on engaging with complexity in the Bengal delta has been invaluable in developing the

Acknowledgments xxi arguments of this book—a book I regret I cannot hand to him in person at the British Library where we first met.

I also want to thank my friends who embarked on PhDs alongside me: Katerina Pantelides, Sophie Stammers, and Nari Senanayake for their support. Nari, in particular, put me on this academic course more than a decade ago and to this day challenges me in my thinking. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Sibilia, Megnaa Mehtta, and Debjani Bhattacharyya for their comments and suggestions on the first chapter, and to Anwesha Dutta for her unwavering support to help motivate me to finish this manuscript during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thanks to Rahul Ranjan for his constant positive encouragement and to Sindre Bangstad, Aike Rots and Hugo Reinert for their collegial support. I am also grateful to the many fellow hobby epidemiologists and citizen activists in Sweden for their compassion, courage, and intellectual honesty during difficult times.

I could not have done this research and the subsequent write-up without family. Warm thanks to Sabiha and Runa Apa and their family, particularly their late mother, in Khulna city for welcoming me into their homes and treating me as family during my breaks from fieldwork in Nodi. I am honored to have been able to spend time with such an exceptional and intellectual family. I am grateful to the Tagg-Roberts family for welcoming me into their home in London and a special thanks to Daphne for invaluable proofreading, critical commentary, and endless encouragement in the earliest versions of this manuscript. Thanks to my in-laws Gabrielle Welle-Strand and Christian Wetlesen Horn for their endless hospitality, generosity, and patience over the years. I am deeply indebted to all my family in Dhaka: my maternal aunts, Mejho Mama and Mami, and maternal cousins, particularly Dewan Akram-ul Haq and Shaila Arman, for their help with Sadhu Kaka’s song. A special thanks to the entire Alam family (Choto Khalama and Khalu, Moyukh, Rumi, Aadro, and Shemonti) for providing me with a second home in Bangladesh, and for caring for and feeding me and my family over the years. Thanks to Boro Khalama for her amazing cooking, and Laila Arman, Omar Ali, Dhrubo, Shaion, and Dewan Sohel for anchoring me to Bangladesh in Sweden. Thanks to my family in Pabna: my late Boro Mama and Mami, and Choto Mama and Mami. I am particularly grateful to my late Nani for inspiring me to work in Bangladesh. My deepest gratitude to my mother Farida, sister Emelie, and father Dewan Nausher Ali for being supportive in various ways throughout the different stages of my academic career: your generosity, encouragement, intellectual curiosity, and moral support has been invaluable. Lastly, thanks to my daughter Aurora for her patience and to my husband Ulrik for his emotional, reproductive, and practical support during all the fieldwork, xxii Acknowledgments long working hours, and deadlines. I am indebted to Ulrik for reading countless drafts, providing constructive suggestions, and unfaltering encouragement while enabling me to focus on my writing—I could not have completed this book without him.

ABBREVIATIONS

BDT Bangladeshi Taka

BWDB Bangladesh Water Development Board

CEIP Coastal Embankment Improvement Project (2013-2022) CEP Coastal Embankment Project (1960s)

CGIAR Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers FAP Flood Action Plan

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IRRI International Rice Research Institute

LGED Local Government Engineering Department NGO Nongovernmental Organization

OOP Out-of-Pocket Expenditure

ppt parts per thousand

PRSPs Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers

SAPs Structural Adjustment Policies

TRM Tidal River Management

USAID United States Agency for International Development WaSH Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene

WFP World Food Programme xxiii

S maae BHUTAN o Darjeeling NEPAL o Siliguri P D ® 5 i G INDIA RANGPUR \ La Northeastern Region Sang ri S79 We en 3 Re x JX N 2 ~™ c\ & j` A m, ) 20, N S 4 Me “i SYHET BS 2 l Farakka RAJSHAHI 5 if - DHAKA \‘e. \ Barrage \\\ \ i / a ee Ny se SX BANGLADESH L oa gen INDIA SA ie, f / $ y i West Bengal Ta \ Dhaka j g srl a ra P X ENER zj š 2 D by À D A & CHITTAGONG @ ee.

Koxata o - N) Chattogram 2 ` À py eee VY o k SY ( J Vid (a i. y NE: y) AM Ae / s TNE NS ts 1} se q A \ v \\ Z \ zZ Bay of Bengal a 1»?

À, CJ Study Area \ Mangrove NO 50 100 KILOMETERS —— National Boundary ® o 50 700 MILES —-— Division Boundary

Map 1. Bangladesh. Mapped by Ben Pease.

30 KILOMETERS

30 MILES 5

BARISAL DISTRIC m | Study Area

Mangrove

Embankments

—-— Division Boundary

Bay of Bengal

District Boundary

Map 2. Southwest and South-Central Coastal Zones. Mapped by Ben Pease.

MISREADING THE BENGAL DELTA

Introduction

Climate Reductive Translations in Development

In 2018, climate-related overseas development assistance totaled US$33.2 billion globally, up from US$24.2 billion in 2014. In order for countries and NGOs to access this funding, climate change adaptation or mitigation must be a principal or significant goal of development interventions (Donor Tracker 2021). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ranks Bangladesh as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world, and climate change is now mainstreamed into all of Bangladesh’s development activities (Lewis 2010; Alam 2019). From 2011 to 2018, donors and development agencies (including EU member states and the World Bank) allocated approximately US$20.59 billion to Bangladesh.’ In 2012 the World Bank allocated US$400 million for flood-protection embankments as climate adaptation infrastructure. To access such considerable funding streams, nongovernmental organizations, state bureaucracies, and research institutions in Bangladesh must ensure that their project proposals for development interventions appear as climate relevant. Often, such project proposals rely on appealing to donors’ perceptions of Bangladesh’s low-lying floodplains as being at particular risk as global sea levels rise, making the country an “epicenter of climate change” (Cons 2018, 272).

The common reading of Bangladesh as a victim of climate change assumes that as global warming increases, ice caps will melt, sea levels will rise, low-lying Bangladesh will drown, and people will flee because of floods and increasingly frequent natural disasters (cyclones), thus in turn becoming climate change refugees (Jolly and Ahmad 2019; Vidal 2018). While simplified narratives may help make development interventions seem related to climate change adaptation or resilience in order to attract aid funding, does it accurately capture the causality of floods in complex coastal landscapes? Might it even risk exacerbating environmental degradation and increasing coastal vulnerability to climatic change?

Bangladesh is located in the largest delta in the world, formed by the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers. This is a hydrologically active delta with meandering rivers that continuously reshape the land, through both erosion and sedimentation. Each year, these rivers carry approximately 40 billion cubic feet of silt on their journey from the Himalayas down to the Bay of Bengal—an incredible 25 percent of the total annual sediment of the world river system (Iqbal 2010). Silt can be described as part water and part mud (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2013, 7) and is the intractable soil-water admixture particular to the Bengal tidal basin (Bhattacharyya 2018). Accumulated sand and silt are embedded into riverine environments making it hard to distinguish solid land from fluid waters, especially during the annual monsoon. Indeed, silt destabilizes a clear dichotomy between land and water. Silt in these waters have, after all, the ability to raise existing land levels and create new land masses in the rivers, locally known as chars, best described as islands made of silt. Silt can change whole waterscapes and ecologies. In the unembanked Sundarbans mangrove forests, the flooding of silted river water raises land levels each year, keeping pace with sea level rise (Auerbach et al. 2015).

This silted delta has an innate ability to adapt to a certain amount of sea-level rise caused by global warming. Together with monsoon rains, rivers, canals, (agricultural) wetlands, mangroves, and char islands (da Cunha 2018), the hydrological characteristics of this delta complicate narratives of Bangladesh’s vulnerability to rising sea levels. A misreading of the coastal landscape, such as viewing embankments as “flood-protection” infrastructure against rising sea levels, diverts attention away from environmental processes that compromise Bangladesh’s ability to withstand future climatic risks.

Misreading the Bengal Delta combines detailed environmental history with an ethnographic study of southwest coastal Bangladesh to show 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. My intent is not to deny climate change, but to show the risks of development projects attributing environmental change to climate change, even when it is not the case. Until the 1990s, global warming was often associated with “climatic change,” an index of change in the climate system to which interseasonal variations in weather would contribute. Since then, the term has been increasingly replaced by “climate change,” a discursive shift from an adjective to a noun that denotes the role of climate as the main causative agent of interannual weather variation (Hulme 2015; 2011). Climatic change denotes the physical effects of anthropogenic global warming, It is a real material phenomenon that will subject Bangladesh to a certain amount of sea level rise, changing monsoon patterns, variability of the dry season, and increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones, thunderstorms, and tidal waves (Hanlon, Roy, and Hulme 2016). By differentiating between physical processes of climatic change and the discursive ideas of climate as the main cause of change, this study demonstrates how climate change can be a powerful discursive phenomenon that alters expectations of causality.