Climate Change in Bangladesh: Global Players vs Local Activism

In this edition of Sambandh Scholars Speak, Niharika Mehrotra interviews Kasia Paprocki on her book, Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh, published by Cornell University Press in 2021.

Bangladesh has long been ranked among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. For example, it is estimated that approximately 15 to 30 million Bangladeshis will need to migrate by 2050 as a result of rising sea levels. In Threatening Dystopias, Paprocki examines how the consequences of climate change are tackled both by local actors comprised of farmers, labourers and other civil society members, and by international actors including donors, research centers, policy-makers, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Paprocki argues that due to the precarious climate situation in Bangladesh, a crisis narrative has been created by international actors, which uses Bangladesh as an “adaptation laboratory” (p. 973). The book captures how development in Bangladesh is now characterized by “a mandate for export-led growth and accompanying social and economic transitions” (p. 978). For example, the Bangladeshi government has advocated for an increase in shrimp aquaculture for export diversification, disregarding its effect on increased soil salinity that harms the environment. This also means shifting farmers’ livelihoods from traditional rice agriculture, which has in turn resulted in large-scale displacement of local communities. Through this case, Paprocki investigates how development further entrenches local and labor inequalities in urban sectors. On the other hand, the book also examines rural and political movements in the country and how they respond to these changes. In their activism, local actors fail to invoke the positionality of climate change by framing issues exclusively from a lens of historical inequalities. This roots local activism in the time of colonialism and the current local and international power hierarchies that they have translated into.

Using ethnographic and archival fieldwork, Paprocki presents us with an analytical framework to illustrate how climate change operates in a duality. On one hand, there are global actors petitioning for development strategies that breed inequality and on the other, local activists push to challenge inequality in the country without addressing climate change.

Niharika Mehrotra: The book points out the dangers of depoliticizing climate change especially by international climate justice organizations and NGOs. By integrating local politics and recognizing the political and social inequality that breeds climate change, this danger can be prevented. Could you elaborate on how donors and NGOs can go down this path?

Kasia Paprocki: The experience of climate change is mediated by existing power relations and social inequalities. That means that addressing those politics directly is necessary to pursue equitable climate action.

Many of the development agencies working to address climate change today (in Bangladesh and elsewhere) do so without addressing these power relations.

The contemporary development model in Bangladesh has shaped profound levels of social and economic inequality. This is characterized in part by the dispossession of farmers and agrarian workers who are increasingly pushed into cities where they may or may not find precarious work in construction, garments and other export industries. The promises of development in Bangladesh are not (and have never been) shared equally. Many of the development agencies working to address climate change today (in Bangladesh and elsewhere) do so without addressing these power relations. They claim to promote climate change adaptation or mitigation while leaving these existing power dynamics intact. In fact, they draw on precisely these unequal development models to imagine and promote climate change adaptation. But these inequalities are what has caused climate change in the first place, and what has made vulnerability to it so catastrophic in many parts of the world.

Instead of attempting to address climate change as somehow separate from these other dynamics, donors, NGOs and government policy-makers need to look directly at how climate change is entangled with these other politics. The unequal development models that have caused climate vulnerability cannot be the solutions to addressing it.

NM: The Bangladeshi Government seems to play a dual role where on the one hand, it advocates  fighting climate change on international fora yet on the other hand, commits to building a coal-fired power plant in Rampal in collaboration with the Indian Government. What does this contradiction tell us about how governments navigate the global geopolitics of climate change.

KP: Examining climate politics at multiple scales from Bangladesh offers an important lesson in how to think about the contradictions in global climate politics more generally.

Mainstream discourses on climate justice often seem to suggest that transferring funds from the Global North to the Global South will be sufficient for achieving it. If we allow our analysis of climate justice to operate only at this level of the nation-state, then we miss so much — both about the politics driving historic and continued emissions, as well as about what justice can look like in terms of how these changes are responded to in the present.

The Bangladeshi government and, in particular, the leaders who negotiate on behalf of the Bangladeshi state in global climate change negotiations, have been very effective at conveying this message that the impact of climate change is being experienced disproportionately by communities that hold the least responsibility for historic carbon emissions. The case these leaders make at the UN Conference of Parties on Climate Change and similar international fora is quite straightforward: countries like Bangladesh are owed reparations for the impact of climate change from countries of the Global North, because Bangladesh and other less developed countries have historically emitted the least carbon.

Basically, the argument here is that this inequality between nations should be the primary organizing principle of efforts to pursue climate justice through reparations and other forms of climate finance (including, for example, payments for “loss and damage”).

Yet when we start to think about what this vision of climate justice looks like at the local scale, we find that it is insufficient because it leaves inequality within states and local communities intact. Even while making demands for redistributive climate justice at the international scale, the Bangladeshi government continues to pursue a vision of development within the country that entails high levels of inequality, rampant agrarian dispossession, and even, as you noted, the scaling-up of energy systems powered by fossil fuels, as exemplified by the Rampal power plant. This contradiction is not an anomaly, it is inherent to mainstream visions of climate action around the world.

NM: This book uses interviews conducted with multiple stakeholders including NGOs, government officials, research centres, international donor foundations, as well as farmers, local activists, laborers and migrant workers. How do you think this multi-dimensional approach benefitted your argument.

KP: What I found in the course of interviewing this diverse set of actors was they not only interpreted ecological change differently (what is changing, why is it changing, and whether the changes are good or bad), but these competing interpretations of change shape the way in which climate change adaptation is planned for and pursued.

The people I worked with in coastal Bangladesh while conducting this research (farmers, local activists, labourers and migrant workers), who are often referred to as the victims of climate change or as climate migrants, do not refer to themselves this way.

Other scholars have written critiques of dominant climate discourses that question the narratives of major NGOs, donors and policy makers about climate crisis and adaptation. What I think is important about the approach I have taken in engaging with so many different actors is that, in addition to examining these dominant discourses, I also engage the perspectives of the people whose lives and livelihoods are the targets of their interventions but who see what is happening very differently. The people I worked with in coastal Bangladesh while conducting this research (farmers, local activists, labourers and migrant workers), who are often referred to as the victims of climate change or as climate migrants, do not refer to themselves this way. In fact, they often do not see climate change as a significant factor shaping their lives and livelihoods at all. Instead, they identify a range of other dynamics largely related to the political economy of development and agrarian change as the most important factors shaping their lives today.

So, by engaging with these groups that don’t expressly address themselves to climate change, but whose lives are profoundly shaped by these attempts to address it, the book offers a different perspective than many others. I think the key benefit is that it helps us to understand climate change and its impacts within a much broader context. It tells us that a myopic focus on climate change to the exclusion of a variety of other politics and histories that have shaped how it is experienced is really insufficient if what we are interested in is learning how to pursue more just futures for everyone.

NM: The framework adopted by Threatening Dystopias allows for us to integrate local activism with global climate justice. In the case of South Asia, the violent past of colonialism has also contributed to the climate crises. Given the disadvantageous history, how can the region bridge the gap between local activism and global climate justice in order to devise developmental strategies?

Social and ecological change in Bangladesh today has been profoundly shaped by colonialism and its legacies, so recognition of this helps us to better understand climate change today.

KP: What a brilliant question this is. My concern in the book is not only to identify problems with existing adaptation programs in Bangladesh, but to situate these in relation to a much broader global political economy of climate action and climate knowledge that shapes and is shaped by them. This requires looking not only at multiple geographic scales, but also multiple historical scales. Social and ecological change in Bangladesh today has been profoundly shaped by colonialism and its legacies, so recognition of this helps us to better understand climate change today.

Recently scholars such as Keston Perry and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò have been writing about the need for climate reparations as a response to the disproportionate impact of climate change on formerly colonised communities. I think this is a really critical intervention in discussions of global climate justice. Recognition of the need for reparations for colonialism would be extraordinarily different from that for carbon emissions because it would denaturalize the vulnerability to climate change and direct attention to demands for alternative development models.

A lot of contemporary conversations about climate justice, as I noted above, discuss these disproportionate impacts as somehow accidental, without highlighting why countries of the Global South are so often more vulnerable to climate change. It is not accidental that Bangladesh is more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This vulnerability is the direct result of the colonial legacies that have shaped inequality in land and resource access, catastrophic infrastructure planning decisions, and contemporary economic development models that undermine agrarian livelihoods in favour of export-led urban growth.

The book demonstrates that much global climate justice activism is remarkably silent on these questions of colonialism and its contemporary reverberations, while most progressive activism taking place in Bangladesh today prioritizes local concerns around social and economic rights while rarely using the language of climate change. I think both of these scales of progressive activism have a lot to offer one another, and would benefit from speaking to each other more directly. Local activists in Bangladesh could contribute to and benefit from articulating how their concerns are part of this broader global political economy of development and adaptation. Likewise, global climate justice movements will only be successful if they are able to see and articulate how the experience of climate change is always mediated by existing power inequalities. Social movements working toward decolonisation and class, race, and gender justice in particular communities should be leading the way in shaping understandings of what climate justice could look like.

NM: The book points to many assumptions made by foreign NGOs on how only a particular pathway of development can help Bangladesh from its climate crisis. How does knowledge production by such actors effect the local realities of the region in terms of what is salvageable and what is doomed?

KP: One of the key points I make in the book is that these power dynamics not only shape ideas about what should be done about climate change, but they shape our very understandings of what is happening — what the physical impacts of climate change are and will be in Bangladesh.

This relationship between knowledge production and social and economic power leads to a collapse in understandings of the kinds of futures which are possible and those which are desirable. This leads to limited understandings of possible futures, because development agencies and policy makers are only able to see possibilities for those futures they already see as desirable. But who gets to decide what kinds of futures are desirable?

The result is that the physical landscape is actually transforming in the image of this very limited understanding of development. The coastal lands continue to be submerged under water as a direct result of development interventions that imagine urban futures as the only possibility for this region, undermining the possibilities for agrarian livelihoods.

Recently, Bangladeshi sociologist Anwar Hossen wrote an important article arguing that a decolonized Sociology within Bangladesh is necessary for pursuing climate justice. This is a call which is absolutely supported by my findings in the book. Climate justice demands not only more equitable distribution of climate funds, but also new ways of understanding environmental change that centre the concerns and priorities of marginalised communities who are most threatened by it.

Climate crisis in Bangladesh is not and has never been inevitable. It is produced by systems of power and resource distribution that long predate climate change itself. We can only see outside of this if we directly address these power dynamics that got us here in the first place.

About the author:

Kasia Paprocki is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work draws on and contributes to the study of the political economy of development and agrarian change with a focus in South Asia. Links to her other popular and academic publications are available at www.kasiapaprocki.com.