Winner of the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize in the Environmental Humanities Category, ACLS and Arcadia

An unexpected story of climate change initiatives that threaten a complex waterscapePerilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Yet to what extent do adaptation projects address local needs and concerns? Combining environmental history and ethnographic fieldwork with development professionals, rural farmers, and landless women, Misreading the Bengal Delta critiques development narratives of Bangladesh as a "climate change victim." It examines how development actors repackage colonial-era modernizing projects, which have caused severe environmental effects, as climate-adaptation solutions. Seawalls meant to mitigate against cyclones and rising sea levels instead silt up waterways and induce drainage-related flooding. Other adaptation projects, from saline aquaculture to high-yield agriculture, threaten soil fertility, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Bangladesh’s environmental crisis goes beyond climate change, extending to coastal vulnerabilities that are entwined with underemployment, debt, and the lack of universal healthcare.

This timely book analyzes how development actors create flawed causal narratives linking their interventions in the environment and society of the Global South to climate change. Ultimately, such misreadings risk exacerbating climatic threats and structural inequalities.

Misreading the Bengal Delta is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749624

"[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."

"Insightful case studies and [a] lucid portrayal of the complex and fluid entanglement of landscapes, people and technologies through time."

Camelia Dewan is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo.