Guest edited by Sarah Knuth and Jason Cons
T
he thinkers assembled in this Society and Space forum have been invited to reflect on the rich contributions of Dr. Kasia Paprocki’s book, Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Adaptation in Bangladesh (2021, Cornell University Press). This book engages the problem of climate change and the highly charged politics of how climate futures are being defined, foreclosed, and contested across an increasing number of sites today. Through an extensive ethnographic engagement with coastal Bangladesh, Threatening Dystopias demonstrates that presentist and anticipatory debates about climate change are rooted in much deeper place-specific political legacies. Paprocki shows how these are bound up in past and ongoing negotiations of contested futures.
As Paprocki underlines in Threatening Dystopias, Bangladesh’s centrality in contemporary discussion of climate change emerges in dialogue with politicized global imaginations of its vulnerability—attributed uncritically and anti-politically to its physical geography as a deltaic country, its low-lying coastal regions, and the human-made polders that surround its many islands. In these global imaginations, coastal Bangladesh is presented as self-evidently under existential threat from sea level rise and other climatic changes. Through such circulations, it emerges as a climate change ground zero framed both as a space of exceptional risk and a plausible model—or perhaps cautionary tale—for understanding adaptation within many other places. As Paprocki explores, such representations are advanced by many international actors deeply concerned with the vulnerability of the place and its coastal populations. These visions of vulnerability are grafted onto far more complex actually-existing physical geographies: shifting watery conditions and baselines, new and old inhabitation and inundation practices, and experiences of risk in an unruly, in-flux deltaic landscape.
Threatening Dystopias is centrally concerned with elaborating the politics of these claims about the nature of climate and its risks. To do so, Paprocki outlines what she calls “the adaptation regime”: a development regime that emerges through both international and national actors that puts visions of dystopia to work—transforming regions, communities, and livelihood practices in the name of climate adaptation and in the service of depeasantization, capitalization, and urbanization. The stakes of this powerful political project are frequently stark. As Paprocki explores, complicity, expediency, and brutality underlie the adaptation regime in Bangladesh. Moreover, the adaptation regime subsumes (and in doing so, often erases) longer-running political ecologies of land grabbing and dispossession related to shrimp aquaculture—a process that involves the forced flooding of land with salt water, the displacement of farming and agrarian livelihoods, and the saline toxification of fertile agrarian terrain (and the bodies that work it).
The picture that emerges is grim. But equally clear in the book, are powerful arguments and strategies for generatively breaking with such narratives of structural hopelessness, inevitable coastal depopulation, and out-migration to cities in and beyond Bangladesh. In contrast to narratives that erase rural coastal futures, Paprocki presents powerful examples of social movements engaged in constructive and proactive projects of alternate future-making. This community-driven work imagines very different kinds of deltaic landscapes than coasts abandoned to shrimp. In the process, Paprocki shows that these movements are plausibly defining a very different kind of climate adaptation in place (one perhaps illegible in the technocratic language climate change). Their work is shaping a future comprised of more labor-intensive (and labor-generating) practices like freshwater rice cultivation. These groups shape alternative futures (and alternative adaptation regimes) through tactics that actively reclaim and repair the damages of past socioecological harms such as those caused by shrimp aquaculture.
The book’s impressive ability to deliver such grounded insight speaks deeply to the level of care, diligence, and toughness required to advance the tradition of political ecology and to translate that tradition’s critique to engage climate adaptation politics today. Paprocki’s contribution testifies to the insights and collaborative political work that such a collective intellectual project can advance. As the reflections on her work collected here suggest, the value of this sustained engagement and praxis—for Paprocki, her interlocuters, social movements in the field, and to others concerned about the politics of adaptation—are multiple and profound. It is a pleasure to introduce this collection to Society and Space’s readers.
Sarah Knuth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research focuses on critical geographies of climate change and energy transition, finance and the green economy.
