







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 6(1): 143-146, January 2023 

 

BOOK REVIEW 

Climate Change Adaptation and Neoliberalism in 
Bangladesh: A Review of Two Monographs 

Iftekhar Iqbal 

Dewan, Camelia. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, 
Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle: University of 
Washington Press 
Paprocki, Kasia. 2021. Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate 
Change Adaptation in Bangladesh. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 

 

  

 
 History and International Studies Programme, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, 
iftekhar.iqbal@ubd.edu.bn 

Copyright © Iqbal 2023. Released under Creative Commons Attribution © NonCommercial 
4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author. Published by Indian Society for 
Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic Growth, University Enclave, 
North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581–6152 (print); 2581–6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v6i1.890   

mailto:iftekhar.iqbal@ubd.edu.bn
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v6i1.890


 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [144] 

 

The extraordinary attention paid to Bangladesh’s vulnerability to climate 
change is puzzling, especially when compared to other countries situated 
along the South Asian coastal littoral. Even the neighbouring Indian state of 
West Bengal and Myanmar receive far less alarmist reviews than 
Bangladesh, which is overwhelmingly singled out as the poster child of 
climate doom. It is as if climate change has picked a personal feud with the 
people of Bangladesh. Why is that so? Two recent books, one authored by 
Camelia Dewan and the other by Kasia Paprocki, should be read as directly 
addressing this discursive slant, by offering insightful research and 
compelling ethnography.  

Both monographs focus on the coastal regions that lie in the southwest of 
Bangladesh. Their aim, at heart, is to link global discourses of climate 
change with national development narratives through the trope of 
“adaptation”. By carefully studying and analysing several development-
oriented projects—such as embankment construction, shrimp aquaculture, 
and commercial agriculture—Dewan shows how each of these initiatives 
tends to be shaped  by the spectre of climate change. Dewan explains that a 
group of “brokers”, including NGOs, consultants, and government 
agencies—who are often funded by specific climate donors—get the high 
science of climate change translated into an alarmist discourse. The 
inevitable outcome of these “climate reductive translations” (p. 16) is the 
systematic establishment of an “adaptation regime”, which emphasizes that 
embankments must be in place to check rising water and salinity levels; 
shrimp cultivation must be increased to make the most of the higher level 
of salinity; and commercial agriculture should be promoted because 
subsistence agriculture is considered inadequate to increase the real income 
of the poor. Dewan chronicles the environmental implications and the 
social and political consequences of these adaptation practices: 
waterlogging, displacement, disease, consumption of contaminated food, 
and enhanced inequality, among other ills.  

Paprocki’s monograph adopts the same critical lens, scrutinizing neoliberal 
strategies that have been pushed by the World Bank and other international 
agencies. In particular, she offers a detailed critique of the shrimp farming 
industry, which is being widely advocated as part of an adaptation regime. 
She focuses on the way the “naturalization of crisis” (p. 79)  of climate 
change has become part of the knowledge system of adaptaion. Despite her 
fairly searing critique, Paprocki offers an optimistic view in exploring 
instances of successful agrarian resistance against the adaptation protocol 
and thus presents a nuanced understanding of the fragilities inherent in the 
neoliberal discourse. Her comparison of the two neighbouring areas 
(around polder 22 and polder 23) shows how the suffering of the people of 



[145] Iqbal 

 
 

polder 22 contrasts with the relative respite of those of polder 23—which 
was achieved through collective resistance. With an insightful note on the 
people’s insistence on “agrarian” as opposed to “political” climate justice, 
Paprocki demonstrates that successful resistance is possible under 
neoliberal conditions.  

While there is little to disagree with in the findings of the books, some of 
the ethnographic data on which their findings have been based could be 
traced to similar events and contexts from as far back as the 1980s. For 
example, the displacement, violence, and even the killing of cultivators by 
commercial shrimp producers and speculators became a recurring feature 
when Bangladesh’s export income from shrimp cultivation soared from $19 
million in 1978 to $170 million in 1992–1993. Moreover, in the same 
period, the area under shrimp cultivation increased from 20,000 to 120,000 
hectares (Haggart 1994, 66–67). Put differently, since an overt nexus 
between neoliberalism and climate discourse had not yet crystallized in the 
1980s, there must be other factors beyond neoliberalism that explain the 
ecological and social vulnerabilities in coastal Bangladesh.   

It is not coincidental that the 1980s was also the starting point for the 
expansion of shrimp cultivation, following the Indian government’s 
construction of the Farakka Barrage upstream on the Ganga river. 
Bangladesh has long maintained that the building of Farakka has led to a 
decline of the deltaic sweet water regime and an increase in salinity levels in 
the region. Besides, there is also considerable documentation showing an 
aggravation in the intensity of flooding and the severity of land erosion and 
an associated shrinkage of livelihood options for subsistence fishers and 
cultivators. Other current and planned infrastructures along many of the 54 
rivers that Bangladesh shares with India are expected to further exacerbate 
the already stressed environmental and economic situation in wide swathes 
of the delta, including the study area covered by these two books (Iqbal 
2019, 26–31; 2022, 107–117).  

By marginalizing the extensive upstream interventions that have ecologically 
stressed the wider deltaic systems, ethnographers sometimes run the risk of 
buying into the narrative of many international funders. In a recent World 
Bank report on Bangladesh’s coastal resilience in the context of climate 
change, terms like “adaptation” and “shrimp” abound, but there is no 
mention of the ecological impacts of the Farakka barrage or the Teesta 
dams (Kazi et al. 2022). In failing to adequately acknowledge the impacts of 
these large-scale hydraulic interventions on the Ganga, both the 



 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [146] 

 

monographs reveal a disconnect between their richly textured 
ethnographies and the region’s geopolitics. 

 This quibble aside, both the books deserve high commendation—
particularly as critiques of climate change adaptation strategies that have re-
envisioned neoliberalism. The adaptation regime has become a discursive 
signifier of neoliberalism’s appropriation of climate change as a hegemonic 
tool. The intimate stories of the coastal people in Bangladesh that Dewan 
and Paprocki explore add to a genre of scholarship that draws sharper links 
between the historical and environmental ethnographies of the region (Jalais 
2021; Bhattacharya 2018; Cons 2020). These monographs may inspire 
similar studies that investigate how neoliberal development projects aim to 
appropriate climate disourse to legitimize its continued presence.   

REFERENCES 

Bhattacharya, Debjani. 2018. Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.  

Cons, Jason. 2020. “Delta Temporalities: Choked and Tangled Futures in the 
Sundarbans.” Ethnos. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1697334. 

Haggart, Kelly, ed. 1994. Rivers of Life. Dhaka: Bangladesh Centre for Advanced 
Studies. 

Iqbal, Iftekhar. 2019. “Governing Mass Migration to Dhaka: Revisiting Climate 
Factors.” Economic & Political Weekly 54, no. 36. 

Iqbal, Iftekhar. 2022. “Locating the Riparian Commons in Eastern South Asia.” In 
Urban Development and Environmental History in South Asia, edited by Ian Talbot and 
Amit Ranjan. New York: Routledge. 

Jalais, Annu. 2021. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans. 
New Delhi: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003300946-10 

Kazi, Swarna, Ignacio Urrutia, Mathijs van Ledden, Jean Henry Laboyrie, Jasper 
Verschuur, Zahir-ul Haque Khan, Ruben Jongejan, Kasper Lendering, and 
Alejandra Gijón Mancheño. 2022. Bangladesh: Enhancing Coastal Resilience in a 
Changing Climate. Washington D.C.: World Bank. https://doi.org/10.1596/38004  

 

https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1697334
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003300946-10
https://doi.org/10.1596/38004

