Misreading the Bengal Delta

"[A] methodologically innovative and rigorous work...The clarity the book offers in identifying the problems around the multiple framings of climate change makes it essential reading for scholars, development practitioners, government policymakers, and general readers interested in climate change and development, Bangladesh, or both."

"Accessible and eloquently written...[Dewan] convincingly shows that coherent policy ideas around climate change adaptation first and foremost tend to reflect the viewpoints and interests of policy actors themselves rather than those of the envisioned beneficiaries."

"A superb decolonial ethnography...Misreading the Bengal Delta is essential reading for anyone who wishes to think critically about climate change and its local effects, about the modes through which it is made legible, and about how superficial reading may be avoided through deep decolonial, historical, and ethnographic exegeses."

"Camelia Dewan brilliantly illustrates how narratives of improvement have acted as metacodes from colonial time to modern day Bangladesh."

"Uniquely, this work focuses on a variety of ‘development brokers’ beyond the ubiquitous English-speaking Western development professionals. Through this focus on brokerage in the development-climate nexus, Dewan highlights the problematic power relations currently deciding climate knowledge production and, through it, advising adaptation projects which ‘misread’ the delta."

"[Dewan] unveils a perspective on the Bengal delta that is both very intriguing and insightful."

"Dewan’s account is a rich and nuanced portrayal of how climate change and development practitioners translate climate change into practice, and the effects that these translations have on local communities...A brilliant and urgent ethnography."

"Dewan’s book is a timely and well-critiqued ethnography of how development projects targeting to adapt to the impact of climate change can become maladaptation because of the missing local context."

"Misreading the Bengal Delta is a must-read for every (social) scientist, journalist, activist or development worker who has ever evoked Bangladesh as an instant image of sea-level rise and climate change disasters. It expertly outlines how ‘adaption regimes’ reproduce existing postcolonial inequalities and adds some much-needed complexity to our understanding of climate change and environmental vulnerabilities in the global South."

"Finding echoes across the global South, Dewan’s brilliant, urgent book shows us what we miss when we treat climate change as a problem in isolation. Based on deep ethnographic research, this work of rigorous analysis and great moral clarity demonstrates that climate change is among a cluster of ecological and livelihood risks faced by the most vulnerable communities."

"This magisterial work shows how the problems of coastal Bangladesh go far beyond the "climate reductive translations" that currently dominate policy readings, and reveals far murkier waters shaped by a political ecology of extraction that they obscure."

"Dewan explores, through meticulous and well-written ethnography, how the idea of climate change shapes the direction of development projects and interventions."

"An important contribution to an emerging critical literature on climate change in Bangladesh and beyond."

"Camelia Dewan offers a vitally important corrective to simplistic narratives of global warming.... This book was eye-opening for me: it joins a growing body of research that suggests that ‘climate change,’ when used as a catch-all explanation, can obscure the historical and geo-political roots of many environmental problems.... The exact balance between atmospheric and other anthropogenic impacts is not easy to ascertain but it is vital to try, which is why the humanities are so crucial for our understanding of the planetary crisis."

"In this ethnographically rich and empirically rigorous book, Dr. Dewan shows her reader how differently situated people understand, experience, and act with regard to cyclones, flooding, coastal erosion, and sea level rise. More than that even, she shows us whose ideas about social and ecological futures are accorded power and whose are not. This is a must read for all of us working on climate change, decolonial methodology, and political ecology."

"One of Dewan's most important achievements consists in showing how local knowledge is more relevant and flexible in dealing with climate change than the technocratic solutions proposed by government and NGOs. Students of development and anthropology, South Asia and climate change need this book, but so do policymakers at every level. Highly recommended!"

"This important book crashes through the pieties of climate change discourse to show how colonial and profit-making infrastructure causes disastrous flooding and the salinization of agricultural soil. Insightful and carefully researched, Misreading the Bengal Delta is a major contribution to the emerging field of political geomorphology."