[Interview] Camelia Dewan on how ‘climate change’ is becoming a development buzzword to continue business as usual

In December last year, as the largest annual climate conference, the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28), was underway, researchers from a prominent global environmental think tank made a provocative argument: The demand for more climate finance from emerging economies to cope with the effects of climate change, would likely be at the cost of developmental aid.

“The dirty secret of climate finance is that much of it is displacing traditional development aid,” wrote Vijaya Ramachandran, director of energy and development at the environmental research centre Breakthrough Institute, along with her colleague Alex Smith in an article published in Foreign Policy. “Calls for more climate finance are important, but if current practice is any guide, a large share of the funds will be taken from budgets that fund critical development priorities, such as health, education, women’s rights, infrastructure construction, and humanitarian aid,” the article went on to say.

Camelia Dewan, an environmental anthropologist and assistant professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, studied what the rising global interest in funding climate action meant in a Global South country like Bangladesh, which shares many similarities with India.

In her book Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh, Dewan found that “climate change” was commonly applied by fundraisers as a “masala”, or spice, to their project proposals for a better chance at securing funding – even if the projects themselves had little to do with mitigating climate impacts. In other cases, solutions being pushed to mitigate climate impacts had actually exacerbated vulnerabilities in the south-west coast of Bangladesh. A large focus of the book is on how embankments built to contain “climate-induced flooding” have benefitted certain actors while worsening the health of rivers.

According to Dewan, Bangladesh’s perception as a “climate victim” by donor countries has prompted the global development machinery to deploy solutions that are ill-suited to local contexts. Scientists across the world are slowly waking up to this problem, which was recognised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time in its latest series of reports as “maladaptation“.

Through extensive fieldwork in the Sundarbans and south-western coast of Bangladesh, Dewan demonstrates how politically agnostic solutions to environmental problems have not served the communities they intended to. In an interview with Mongabay-India, Dewan talks about the need to move away from imposing broad-based climate solutions to local problems.

Mongabay: Your book is a critique of climate reductive solutions. But what exactly does climate reductivism mean?

Camelia Dewan: The geographer Mike Hulme, who is a founder of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change in the U.K., noted that since the 90s, there’s been a shift from talking about climatic change as an index of change over time, to climate change as a cause of all changes in environment and society. And he terms that climate reductionism.

In Bangladesh, these issues of water logging, shrimp aquaculture, flood protection embankments are sometimes brushed aside or subsumed by the idea that Bangladesh is drowning in sea level rise caused by global warming. When that happens, you can’t talk about the actual local, environmental, or political causes behind these problems. If we say that it’s all climate change and that it is inevitable, it doesn’t really give us a toolkit or a plan of action.

During my fieldwork in the southwest coastal district of Khulna, which I call Nodi, I saw people experience irregularity in the seasons. Precipitation is irregular and infrequent. It can be heavy; it can also not come at all and these uncertainties are extremely pressing. The issue of siltation and the health of water bodies are crucial if we are to make Bangladesh equipped for climatic changes, because you need healthy, deep, wide water bodies to retain monsoon waters, especially during the dry season.

But rather than talking about dying rivers and how embankments worsen waterlogging floods, a popular idea is that low lying Bangladesh will inevitably drown in rising sea levels and that these very same embankments are thus suitable as ‘climate adaptation’ infrastructure.

Mongabay: How have embankments worsened floods in the Bengal Delta?

Camelia Dewan: Embankments that are watertight worsen siltation and water logging by preventing silt brought in by the annual borsha floods from depositing on sediment-deprived floodplains. The silt has nowhere to go, which raises the riverbeds and prevents heavy rainwater inside the embankment from draining out to the river outside. This can turn into disruptive floods that harmful for crops, locally called jalabaddho floods. With historical sources, I show how this history has been documented for over 150 years in my book.

Monsoon borsha inundations were described as blessings of fertility for Bengal. Rather than stopping these monsoon inundations of wetlands, earthen bandhs were broken during the monsoon to flood the land with river mixed rainwater for paddy irrigation. The borsha rainwater merged with the silt-laden river water to deposit silt on the floodplains. The silt raised the land levels and promoted processes of organic decomposition that make the deltaic lands fertile. These inundated wetlands were also the breeding grounds for hundreds of spawning fish species and help irrigate rice planted during monsoon season.

So in view of this, the narrative that all floods must be prevented is highly problematic. Allowing monsoon borsha floods to inundate wetlands was a key way of ensuring that silt did not choke up the rivers.

Mongabay: How have state and developmental institutions engaged with this history of flooding and embankments? Why are they still pushed as a solution?

Camelia Dewan: From 2013 to 2020, the World Bank committed $400 million to building embankments in Bangladesh as climate adaptation. Its plans do not mention siltation or water logging. Areas in southwest Bangladesh enclosed by the planned embankments have lost 1 to 1.5 metres of elevation, while the neighbouring un-embanked Sundarbans mangrove are gaining elevation due to sediment deposited through monsoon flooding. Natural scientists conclude that riverbed sedimentation in Bangladesh caused by the embankments pose a greater threat of coastal flooding than predicted sea level rise in the future.

So the question is, then, to what extent can you solve the issues of siltation and water logging when these are pressing issues which have nothing to do with sea-level rise? If you use climate change as a spice to say that we need higher and wider embankments because Bangladesh is drowning from rising sea levels, then we can’t use the money where it should be used, which is in strengthening our water bodies.

One possible reason why one can say that the World Bank likes embankments is that it’s an easy fix that provides money and materials to build without dealing with the messiness of politics or context. Acknowledging siltation and waterlogging means that they have to go into the maintenance of embankments. These rivers of the Bengal Delta meander, so even if you build an embankment, the river will break it, or it will erode it, and someone has to repair it constantly. And if the river doesn’t do it, the rains will because the monsoon rains are heavy.

In the 1990s, donors wanted to fund a Flood Action Plan in light of a lot of damaging flood events that had occurred towards the end of the 1980s. Civil society pushed back and said that Bangladesh is a land of rivers and rains, and that we must live with floods instead of relying on technocratic solutions that had failed in the past. But the researchers who wrote a report suggesting that we live with floods were blacklisted by the government, though eventually the Flood Action Plan was scrapped.

There also is, to my understanding from local sources, a huge deal of low quality materials being used inefficiently to make embankments, so these big infrastructure projects can be quite profitable for certain actors. Doing canal excavation with local landless laborers is more difficult to top pocket from.

Mongabay: Development is conventionally understood as a means to improve quality of life or standards of living. But what’s interesting is that you characterise it as an industry with conflicting agendas. What are some of those conflicting agendas when it comes to addressing climate change in developing countries like Bangladesh?

Camelia Dewan: In the 1990s, anthropologist Akhil Gupta wrote a classic monograph on India called Postcolonial Development: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. He discusses the emergence of development aid after World War Two, which was anchored to the old colonial and Cold War order with its assumptions and notions of growth, progress, and modernisation. This created a category and identity of previously colonized societies as being ‘underdeveloped’. For a long time, we have even had less developed countries internalising such a hierarchy. A majority of countries, former colonies, are still ignored in the global political system — South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice is an example of that.

Today’s development institutions like the Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are tied into international relations and aid, where technical assistance to the third world has been used to get political control as well. When Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan in the 1960s, then president Ayub Khan was given technical assistance to build 4000 kilometers of embankments in what is now coastal Bangladesh, which has contributed to dying rivers and canals. The Bretton Woods type institutions is where the idea of embankments as a solution to flooding came from.

Economic development is one thing, but the development industry is one that is based on donors, NGOs and governmental organizations. They all want to make sure their “development interventions” are seen as successes. In order to get funding for their work, NGOs, and sometimes even state agencies, use climate change as a “spice” in their proposals to keep getting funding. Why must donors sitting in the Global North dictate what is development in the Global South?

Mongabay: What are some of the implications of using climate change as a “spice” for funding projects?

Camelia Dewan: In the second chapter of my book, I write about an NGO worker in the water and sanitation space who told me that since there’s more funding allocated to climate change in recent years, his organisation felt compelled to use climate change as a masala to do what they have always done. I definitely had the sense, when I was doing my field work, that more and more money is earmarked for climate change. That means that everyone has to talk about climate change in order to continue doing business as usual.

It’s the same with migration research. My article about migration from coastal Bangladesh starts by looking at migration researchers having to frame shrimp induced migration as climate migration after Cyclone Aila hit in 2009. Shrimp cultivators would damage embankments to bring in saltwater during the dry season to increase their yields and profits, but this made the flood protection infrastructure structurally weak and resulted in it totally collapsing.

Once Cyclone Aila hit, these researchers admitted that now with so much money going to climate research, they decided to frame their research as climate migration. But when you do that, you can’t talk about how damaging saltwater shrimp farms, which are used for export, are to local lands. It’s basically a cash crop that’s not really benefiting local livelihoods. When it’s said that people migrating out of these regions do so because of climate change, and that they’re climate migrants, we can’t talk about the politics of this land-use practice that contributes to them choosing to migrate.

Mongabay: Another thing that you say in your book is that what’s considered climate adaptation is always political and always contested. How so?

Camelia Dewan: It depends on how climate change is used as a spice to achieve what. During my fieldwork, I met Mr. Jones, a Western development professional working for a prominent institute and he basically said that Bangladesh should stop growing rice and farm tiger prawns instead, since tiger prawns were a more saline tolerant species and Bangladesh would “inevitably” become more saline due to climate change.

It’s political to call that climate adaptation in a country where rice and fish is what’s considered to make a Bengali. It is political in the sense of exerting power of what counts as climate knowledge. He is presenting an aspect of climate change that suits his shrimp interests while ignoring local environment and politics of how brackish aquaculture is damaging to local coastal Bangladeshi livelihoods.

I think with climate adaptation, it’s much better to say exactly what you’re intending. So, if I say. for instance, that climate adaptation could involve dealing with irregular rain patterns by increasing the water retention capacity of local water bodies and that can be done through rural employment schemes, then I’m grounding it in exactly what part of climate change I’m thinking about and connecting it to local environments. But these big broad stroke statements that declare climate adaptation as just this, without explaining the mechanisms in between and how it is related to a part of climatic change, is problematic.

Mongabay: You say that local communities and ecosystems ultimately bear the brunt of climate reductive readings of environmental and social problems. How can their voices be empowered and included in climate policy discussions?

Camelia Dewan: I think by not asking them how they are climate vulnerable and assuming that climate change shapes everything. But to ask what their main concerns and problems are – both in terms of livelihoods and environmental changes. Keeping these questions broad and open-ended and not assuming climate change as the cause of all problems in the environment and society, may be one way forward.

Mongabay: What role do you think social scientists can play in informing hardcore scientific literature on climatic change and climate policy?

Camelia Dewan: For me as an anthropologist, it is to contrast those global narratives and discourses and universal scientific theories with local people’s lived experiences on the ground, to see whether or not there are disconnects. Social scientists can make local issues more visible for solutions that are articulated as better suited for them.

I think the problem is when policymakers sitting in Washington or Geneva decide to fund projects in countries like Bangladesh, where they may have never been, without understanding the local context. Architecture projects that build houses on stilts are considered an example of climate resilience infrastructure, but they may not take into account the fact that these homes are occupied by multigenerational families. How are the elderly going to climb up those stairs? How will drinking water, sanitation and hygiene work when there’s no system of piped indoor plumbing in many of these rural remote areas?

I have colleagues that have written about Bangladesh as an aid lab and then a climate lab. It would benefit to not experiment in countries of the global south to test ideas of what you think climate solutions should be or not be, as a scientist or a global policymaker.

Read more: COP28: Historic deal on fossil fuel transition lacks substance

Banner image: Camelia Dewan, assistant professor of anthropology, Uppsala University. Photo from http://www.cameliadewan.com/