Threatening Dystopias - (Cornell Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment) by Kasia Paprocki (Paperback)

About the Book

"The political ecology of climate change adaptation is shaped by longer histories of development and agrarian change. In coastal Bangladesh, competing visions of this history and of desirable development trajectories under climate change among practitioners, scientists, and local residents shape different possibilities for the future"--

Book Synopsis

Bangladesh 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 from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. And a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable is not one the land and its people can sustain. Threatening Dystopias shows how a powerful rural movement, although hampered by an all-consuming climate emergency, is seeking climate justice in Bangladesh.

Review Quotes

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"

About the Author

Kasia Paprocki is Associate Professor in Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Follow her on X @KasiaPaprocki.