Description
Book SynopsisBangladesh is currently ranked as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. In Threatening Dystopias, Kasia Paprocki investigates the politics of climate change adaptation throughout the South Asian nation. Drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, she engages with developers, policy makers, scientists, farmers, and rural migrants to show how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant political conflicts.
Paprocki looks at how groups craft economic narratives and strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities. Although these groups claim that increased production of export commodities will reframe the threat of climate change into an opportunity for economic development and growth, the reality is not so simple. For the country''s rural poor, these promises ring hollow.
As development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, outmigration
Trade Review
Threatening Dystopias offers a revealing political ecological analysis of climate change adaption in the southwestern Khulna region of Bangladesh, a place extremely vulnerable to threats posed by the climate crisis. Paprocki writes with great eloquence[.] Threatening Dystopias is a masterful study of the global politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh.
* London School of Economics and Political Science Book Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. "Sluttish, Careless, Rotting Abundance": Prehistories of a Climate Dystopia
2. Threatening Dystopias: Development and Adaptation Regimes
3. Opportunity/Crisis: Knowledge Production and the Politics of Uncertainty
4. The Social Life of Climate Science: Circulations of Knowledge and Uncertainty in Development Practice
5. Autopsy of a Village: Agrarian Change after the Shrimp Boom
6. We Have Come This Far—We Cannot Retreat": Adaptation, Resistance, and Competing Visions of Transformed Futures
Conclusion: Climate Justice and the Politics of Possibility
