‍Author Response

I

am honored by these incredibly deep and generative engagements with Threatening Dystopias, and extremely grateful for the thoughtful questions they’ve posed that I will continue to carry with me. The two key themes that each colleague has drawn out in different ways are, on the one hand, the methodological implications that point to broader questions about how we understand climate change, and, on the other, the political implications of the work and the possibilities of climate justice. 

The first point is about methodological choices that allow us to understand climate change in its specific historical and geographic context. While the book is very specifically an ethnography of climate change adaptation in agrarian communities in Bangladesh, as my interlocutors have pointed out, it makes a broader argument about how we need to build our understandings of climate change through research on the specific material dynamics and political economies in particular sites. How is climate change mediated by, and how does it mediate, those existing political economic dynamics? Alex Loftus has described this approach as an example of what Gillian Hart calls the regressive-progressive method (2018), a comment which I take as a great compliment as Hart’s work has been formative for my work in general and influential in this project in particular. 

Second, these colleagues have also pointed out the political stakes of the book, and in particular how it speaks to the possibilities for agrarian livelihoods in the time of climate change (see also Paprocki and McCarthy 2024). Nithya Natarajan has offered a series of comments that revolve around a key question in critical agrarian studies of whether agrarian production is viable or desirable and for whom. Here it is worth noting that my claims about the possibilities of agrarian futures are not intended to romanticize the livelihood of a landless farmer or smallholder, and I absolutely don’t think that returning to what came before shrimp aquaculture is a sufficient vision for a progressive future. But it is a baseline, and the activists I’ve worked with in Bangladesh, including those organizing with Nijera Kori, demonstrate that this return is essentially a precondition for building that vision of progressive agrarian futures because without agrarian livelihoods, the very conditions of possibility of agrarian production and social reproduction are impossible.

Louise Amoore writes in The Politics of Possibility (2013) about how political possibilities are used to exercise power in repressive ways (such as the possibility of terrorism being used to justify tools of surveillance capitalism). The converse of this politics is when possibility is obscured intentionally to exercise power. The idea that agrarian life in Bangladesh is unviable now and in the future due to climate change has become a kind of mantra of many who are ostensibly advocating in the name of climate action. As I show in the book, many farmers and social movement groups are demonstrating that this is not the case, that agrarian livelihoods are viable. 

Part of what this draws out for us is the implication of thinking about climate justice from the perspective of struggle. What I mean by that is that climate change will create the conditions under which all communities will be forced in some way to struggle (obviously not equally), in the face of both new and old challenges. To say that a community is not viable is to say that it is not possible for them to struggle for their own version of a progressive future. Understanding these new and old challenges together is critical to thinking about what these struggles in the face of climate change will entail. One thing I draw out in the book is the symmetry between the teleologies of capitalist developmentalism and the teleologies of climate crisis. In the face of both of these teleologies, recognition of this possibility of an agrarian future is one that is important to fight for - not that it is sufficient, but that it is a condition for pursuing social justice. I demonstrate that this is a condition which is more than ever under threat due to climate change and the discourse surrounding it. 

And finally, Loftus’ invocation of Rangan and Kull’s assertation that scale is what makes ecology political (2009) is absolutely essential here. Precisely what makes my examination of climate change political in Threatening Dystopias is the attention to how political ecologies are interpreted and narrated at multiple scales by different actors, an attention that illuminates both the multiple ways of understanding ecological change today, and the multiple possible climate futures entailed in this interpretation. I couldn’t agree more with Loftus about the need for deeper interrogations of invocations of “planetary” climate justice that suggest it is possible to separate an interpretation of Earth System Science from subaltern perspectives and struggles in specific places.

Attention to these struggles in coastal Bangladesh highlights that the experience of climate change there is always mediated by the political economy of agrarian change. The power to decide what will be produced, how it will be produced, the power to pivot in and out of different strategies for consolidating and concentrating wealth, is one that will always mediate the experience of climate change. At the time of writing this book, that was a story about shrimp aquaculture, but it won’t always be that way. In fact, even in the delta itself there are multiple temporalities and visions of possible futures that shape and reshape the landscape and the possible livelihoods within it (Cons 2023). So these logics of viable climate futures through adaptation are convenient even if they aren’t durable. What is durable is the political economic power exerted by elites to imagine what viable and desirable futures look like, and then to pursue and benefit from them.

Broadly, what the book addresses and these colleagues have drawn out is the politics of determining what and whose life is viable in the time of climate change. Threatening Dystopias demonstrates that agrarian futures in coastal Bangladesh are viable, contrary to many popular and policy narratives, and furthermore it demonstrates the epistemological and political stakes of this claim. These are not abstract questions about future climate threats. Rather, they are questions that are being struggled with on a daily basis in coastal Bangladesh and beyond. 

References

Amoore, Louise. 2013. The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security beyond Probability. Duke University Press.

Cons, Jason. 2023. “Delta Temporalities: Choked and Tangled Futures in the Sundarbans.” Ethnos 88 (2): 308–29.

Hart, Gillian. 2018. “Relational Comparison Revisited.” Progress in Human Geography 42 (3): 371–94.

Paprocki, Kasia, and James McCarthy. 2024. “The Agrarian Question of Climate Change.” Progress in Human Geography 48 (6): 691–715.

Rangan, Haripriya, and Christian A. Kull. 2009. “What Makes Ecology ‘Political’?: Rethinking ‘scale’ in Political Ecology.” Progress in Human Geography 33 (1): 28–45.

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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 political ecology and political economy of development and agrarian change.