DEWAN, CAMELIA. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

“Climate change is a fact” (p. 74). So begins anthropologist Camelia Dewan’s conversation with a western development professional called Mr. Jones, who works for a prominent aquaculture organization in coastal Bangladesh. Mr. Jones goes on, presenting his views on how Bangladeshis can best adapt. He explains that farmers should shift from cultivating rice – a cherished staple – to producing commodities for global export, like prawns. Dewan reports feeling stunned by this vision. Her own research with fishers and farmers in Bangladesh revealed myriad social, ecological, and embodied harms wrought by export-oriented saline aquaculture. She had become acquainted with grassroots activists, who were working to limit the expansion of prawn cultivation. Mr. Jones dismissed such concerns. In his view, the shift to saline aquaculture is “inevitable” (p. 74).   

Ethnography is arguably at its best when it challenges entrenched senses of inevitability and creates openings toward other ways of seeing and acting in the world. Misreading the Bengal Delta accomplishes this feat admirably. Dewan’s account is a rich and nuanced portrayal of how climate change and development practitioners like Mr. Jones translate climate change into practice, and the effects that these translations have on local communities. She convincingly argues that in their search for climate adaptation solutions donors and practitioners undertake “climate reductive translations” (p. 15), which simplify and de-politicize the complex social, political, and natural ecologies of deltaic Bangladesh. In doing so, many of the climate change adaptation initiatives they promote may in fact exacerbate climate-related vulnerability.

In stark contrast to such simplifications, Dewan’s account is thick with historical, sociocultural, political, and environmental context. Adopting a decolonial approach, she links her critique of present-day climate adaptation to longer genealogies of colonial and capitalist extraction from land, water, and people in Bangladesh. In this way, the ethnography provides an altogether different vision of what it means to encounter and respond to socio-ecological change in Bangladesh.

Chapter 1, which explores histories of embankment construction, builds an informative foundation for the book as a whole. Dewan traces continuities between colonial and national land reclamation schemes, embankment-building, and present-day climate and development initiatives. Large tracts of the delta were first reclaimed by the East India Company in their efforts to expand arable, taxable land. At that time, some forms of flooding were still considered beneficial for farming. Monsoon floods, for example, bring vital fresh water and rich deposits of silt to fields and thus increase the fertility of the soil. For this reason, embankments were usually temporary. Over time, however, floods became portrayed as damaging, and the British Raj erected permanent, impenetrable embankments. After independence and partition, the shift to permanent embankments continued. In the 1960s, Dutch-style “polders” were introduced as a part of the USAID and World Bank-funded Coastal Embankment Project. Such infrastructures were ill-suited to the flow of water and sedimentary dynamics in the delta. Over time, these infrastructures led to the siltation of water bodies and raised the water level outside embanked areas, resulting in waterlogging. Despite the deleterious effects of these embankments, similar infrastructures are today advanced as effective means of climate adaptation.

In Chapter 2, Dewan presents a fascinating account of heterogenous “development assemblages” comprised of NGOs,