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What are the political imaginaries contained within representations of urban climate futures? What silent but corollary rural dispossessions accompany them? I investigate these questions through the experience of migrants from rural coastal Bangladesh to peri-urban Kolkata. The threats posed to their villages by a variety of ecological disruptions (both loosely and intimately linked with climate change) drive their migration in search of new livelihoods. Their experiences suggest that the demise of rural futures is entangled with the celebration of urban climate futures. However, social movements in this region resisting agrarian dispossession point to alternative political imaginaries that resist teleologies of urbanization at the expense of agrarian livelihoods. Current work in both agrarian studies and urban studies theorizes these linked dynamics of rural–urban transition, seeking to understand them in relation to broader political economies. I bring these debates into conversation with one another to highlight the importance of attention to counter-hegemonic agrarian political imaginaries, particularly in the face of predictions of the death of the peasantry in a climate-changed world. It won't be possible to identify or pursue just climate futures without them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the shaping of Bangladesh's southern coastal region, often framed as the most climate vulnerable place in the world, as a zone of climate crisis. As rising waters threaten communities inhabiting the low‐lying coastal islands scattered across the deltaic plain, many within the government and donor community have identified shrimp aquaculture as a principal adaptation strategy. Shrimp aquaculture is integral to the dynamics of what I call anticipatory ruination, a discursive and material process of social and ecological destruction in anticipation of real or perceived threats. I elaborate anticipatory ruination as a process that both responds to and produces Bangladesh's climate crisis. I use this concept to explore not only the dynamics taking place in Bangladesh's delta region, but also the ways in which climate crisis is constituted more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development in Bangladesh is increasingly defined by and through an adaptation regime, a socially and historically specific configuration of power that governs the landscape of possible intervention in the face of climate change. It includes institutions of development, research, media, and science, as well as various state actors both nationally and internationally. The adaptation regime operates through three interrelated processes: imagination, experimentation, and dispossession. Each of these processes is produced and manifested both materially and epistemically. The adaptation regime is built on a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable. For the rural poor, this entails dispossession from agrarian livelihoods and outmigration. As this shift contributes to the expansion of production of export commodities such as garments and frozen shrimp, the threat of climate change and its associated migrations is reframed as an opportunity for development and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I articulate a notion of ‘social dispossession,’ an optic that extends current theorizing on agrarian dispossession into the realm of social reproduction, by examining the testimonies of microcredit borrowers in rural Bangladesh. In recent years, research on microcredit has highlighted new forms of subject-making employed by microcredit and other NGO entrepreneurship development programs. These developments have received insufficient attention in scholarship on agrarian change, both globally and in specific places. I correct this by arguing that microcredit drives social dispossession through three specific mechanisms: the confiscation of assets necessary to social reproduction (as well as to production); the construction of debt relations within a community which reshape what reproduction can look like; and the re-configuration of women’s social status and subjectivities in relation to their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis – Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This has, in turn, caused massive depeasantization and ecological crisis throughout the region. Through an examination of two markedly different polders (embanked islands) – one which has been overrun by shrimp production and one that has resisted it – we ask how coastal communities and their members have variously negotiated their rapidly changing ecologies and food systems based on their relative class position and access to land. We highlight the multiple meanings that peasants from different classes ascribe not just to shrimp, but also to broader questions of adaptation, community and life in uncertain terrains. We show that while food sovereignty in non-shrimp areas has averted the depeasantization affecting shrimp areas, it has not necessarily led to greater equality in agrarian class relations. To achieve such ends, we suggest that a broader conception of agrarian sovereignty provides a critical and necessary corollary to self-determination in agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• There is no transcendent condition of viability. • Differences in attention to political economy shape scientific understandings of viability. • Existing knowledge regimes prevent us from seeing alternative pathways. • Political economy of knowledge production shapes the environment. • Viability of agriculture in coastal Bangladesh is co-produced through these knowledge politics. Growing attention to the impacts of climate change around the world has been accompanied by the profusion of discourses about the lives, livelihoods, and geographies that are "viable" and those that are not in the time of climate change. These discourses of viability often invoke concrete physical limits and tipping points suggesting a transcendent natural order. Conversely, I demonstrate how viability is co-produced through political economic structures that exercise power at multiple scales in shaping the environment and understandings of how it is changing. I describe three dialectics of this co-production: epistemic/material (between ideas about viability and their biophysical and political economic conditions), epistemic/normative (between how the world is understood to be and ideas about how we should live in it), and inter-scalar (between geographic scales, where action at one scale shapes both ecologies and understandings of possible action at another). Each of these dialectics shapes the knowledge regimes that govern the ambiguous social and biophysical process of disappearance and foreclosure of livelihood possibilities in the time of climate change. I examine these discourses of viability through narratives of unviable agrarian livelihoods in coastal Bangladesh, as a lens through which to examine the dialectics of viability more broadly. I situate these discourses concretely in relation to an analysis of interdisciplinary social and natural scientific research on ecological and agrarian viability in coastal Bangladesh now and in the future. Across a broad interdisciplinary spectrum, I find that scientific attention to political economy shapes the politics of possibility. Finally, I demonstrate how discourses of viability limit alternative possible economic and ecological futures. I do this through a concrete examination of the co-production of viable agrarian futures within communities in coastal Bangladesh. These alternative visions indicate that the viability of agriculture is shaped by historical and ongoing decisions in the present about cultivation, water management, and development intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a methodological and political intervention in debates over microcredit. It explores outcomes of microcredit interventions in the lives of residents of Arampur, a village in rural northern Bangladesh. Using a community-based research and engagement strategy, we explore recipients' own critiques and experiences of microcredit. These experiences suggest that the cultural and economic template that many microfinance institutions (mfis) superimpose on communities not only fails to map to lived realities, but often reinforces the very problems that mfis claim to address. Microcredit and other 'self-help' development strategies operate through idealised notions of poverty and rural life. We ask how restoring the voices of recipients to debates that seek to shape their futures could transform such interventions. In conclusion, we explore the ongoing debate over microcredit in Arampur and reflect on how re-rooting debates over development in specific places might move such debates from questions of 'self-help' to grounded and historicised projects of self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]