Floating people, changing climate: a migrant-sensitive approach to climate adaptation and mobilities in the Bengal Delta

Abstract

Climate adaptation efforts in the Bengal Delta do not fully integrate migrants, who have moved between rural and urban spaces for decades for diverse reasons that now include the impacts of climate change. Despite the reality of mobile lives in the region, organisations implementing adaptation projects approach circular mobilities as undesirable, against ideals for development. These organisations play a crucial role in shaping how migrants as floating people are considered in such a climate-vulnerable context. Drawing upon a combined 16 months of fieldwork in the Bengal Delta region of India and Bangladesh and using data from in-depth interviews with diverse organisational actors, we find that adaptation projects in this region are mainly designed to keep people in place, as stationary populations in either urban destinations or rural areas of origin. They fail to address the multiplicity of mobilities in the region and neglect compounded vulnerabilities of migrants in the face of intersecting crises such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the findings, we conceptualise and call for a migrant-sensitive approach to adaptation that embraces local complexities of climate-related (im)mobilities and development.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• Covid-19
• migrant-sensitive adaptation
• mobilities
• rural–urban linkages
• Bengal Delta

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to all the research participants, especially the organisational actors in Bangladesh and India, for sharing their experiences and expertise, and for providing critical support during fieldwork. The authors thank David Kyle for providing valuable feedback on the initial draft of the manuscript, as well as the editors at Third World Quarterly and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 All names used in this paper are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality of the participants.

2 Here we primarily use mobility to refer to people’s movement between rural and urban spaces in the Bengal Delta region. It acknowledges that people are moving back and forth and that their movement is more complex than a single journey from one place to another. We use ­‘migration’ when discussing the perspectives of adaptation and development organisations that imagine people as moving from one place to another either permanently or on a predictable, seasonal schedule. Out of necessity, we use ‘migrants’ throughout to refer to mobile people, despite its proximity to the word ‘migration’.

3 Spanning coastlines of Bangladesh and India, the Sundarbans ecoregion was largely uninhabited by people before the eighteenth century when it was transformed by the colonial rulers into revenue-accruing agricultural land through land reclamation efforts and the resettlement of landless marginal people (Jalais 2010).

4 Note that increasing soil salinity is not only due to climate impacts. In fact, the promotion of brackish water-based aquaculture and the damming of upstream fresh water sources are primary causes of salinity intrusion in the region (Paprocki 2015; Giri et al. 2022).

5 In Bangladesh, urban informal workers and returnee migrants were among the groups worst affected by the pandemic (Dhaka Tribune 2021). As late as (August) 2021, when a new viral variant spurred another wave of lockdowns, there was a renewed exodus of migrant workers from Dhaka to their villages (Al Jazeera 2021).

6 Dutta Gupta’s contribution to the analysis draws on 19 interviews with organisational actors in Bangladesh and India, 21 interviews with migrants in Dhaka’s slums, and 20 interviews with return migrants in the Indian Sundarbans.

7 All research participants, including organisational actors, were identified and recruited through purposive sampling, starting with a couple of organisations known for their work on adaptation in rural and urban areas of the region, and then snowballing to identify other potential participants.

8 Participants for this phase of research, including migrants returning to the Indian Sundarbans and organisations working in the area, were mainly identified through an existing collaboration with a research institute working with rural households in the region. Additional ­participants, including local community-based organisations (CBOs), were identified through snowballing, and from organisational websites and social media.

9 Queries framed as who are the migrants, where do they move from and to, along with how, why, and when they move/move back helped form the coding tree for the entire dataset.

10 Additional organisations were identified through snowball sampling in interviews, through participation in climate conferences, and through reviews of organisations’ websites and ­public materials. Purposive sampling was then done to ensure a broad range of types of organisations were included, such as donors or local NGOs. Observations were also conducted at meetings and conferences focused on adaptation. All interviews with organisational actors were conducted in English. Interviews with project beneficiaries were conducted in Bangla with the support of a team of research assistants.

11 Both authors’ research was approved through their respective institutional ethics boards. When data was reanalysed, each author worked only in their own dataset, in accordance with standards for confidentiality outlined in these ethics approvals. Data shared between the authors was anonymised and extensive conversations between the authors coordinated and aligned their separate analyses.

12 Identifying and involving households instead of individuals as entry points for programmes could be a way to address the needs of multiple household members, including those who are often mobile.

13 For instance, learning from Covid-19, the One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) scheme was added to India’s Public Distribution System (PDS), with the aim of allowing inter-state portability of benefits (ie accessing subsidised rations) for migrant beneficiaries (Bharadwaj et al. 2023).

14 For adaptation to be locally led would mean moving beyond binaries like rural or urban, to recognise the role of rural–urban linkages, and migrants as key actors in creating and maintaining these linkages.

Additional information

Funding

This paper builds on both authors’ dissertation field research, each funded by various sources. Dutta Gupta was funded by the National Geographic Society (grant number NGS-54659E-19) and the UC Davis Graduate Program Fellowships. Falzon’s work was funded by the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the Contemporary Centre for South Asia, the Brown Graduate Program in Development, and the Beatrice and Joseph Feinberg Memorial Fund.

Notes on contributors

Tanaya Dutta Gupta

Tanaya Dutta Gupta is Postdoctoral Fellow in Sustainable Livestock Systems at International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), CGIAR. She holds a PhD in sociology from University of California, Davis. Her research broadly focuses on climate adaptation, resilience capacities, and norms, practices and relations in households and communities. Her work is situated across local contexts in South Asia and East Africa. For South Asia, her research explores mobilities, inequalities and bordering processes in Bangladesh and India, along with social protection and resilience of rural women and their households in Bangladesh, in the context of climate change and other shocks and stresses. In East Africa, her work examines how adaptive capacities, practices and social relations shape and are shaped by interventions in response to climate impacts, and how these processes can become more socially inclusive and equitable.

Danielle Falzon

Danielle Falzon is Assistant Professor of sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She holds a PhD in sociology from Brown University. Her research examines power in climate change ­decision-making, in particular how inequalities are institutionalised into decision-making organisations. Her work is situated in two main sites: the United Nations climate negotiations and Bangladesh. In the climate negotiations, she has analysed how the institution privileges the typical traits of Global North countries over Global South countries, how Global North countries have obstructed progressive action on key issues including loss and damage, and how debates have evolved between countries around the Global Goal on Adaptation. Her work in Bangladesh examines how organisations produce adaptation interventions, and how their work ultimately prioritises ideals for modernisation over resilience to climate impacts.