Presentation short abstract

This study shows how dominant adaptation projects reinforce technocratic control and obscure the social processes producing vulnerability, normalizing displacement and marginalization rather than enabling just, community-centered climate resilience.

Presentation long abstract

This study examines climate change adaptation in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, moving beyond dominant narratives that cast climate impacts as external hazards to which vulnerable populations must adjust. Drawing on mapping of adaptation projects and interviews with policymakers, practitioners and academia, the analysis shows how mainstream interventions i.e embankment fortification, mangrove afforestation, livelihood shifts and coastal infrastructure, are anchored in climate society binary that naturalizes vulnerability while obscuring the socio-ecological and economic processes that produce it. By prioritizing technocratic solutions and managerial control, adaptation becomes a vehicle for consolidating state and donor agendas rather than addressing the everyday realities of marginalized groups. In the project documentation, gender is operationalized as a numeric checkbox, with women’s decision making power, control over resources, differential exposure to climate risk or divergent social burdens addressed systematically. Similarly, displacement, both direct through resettlement and indirect through dispossession of land and livelihood because of salinity, waterlogging and loss of access to commons is rarely acknowledged in project documentation, reflecting a normalization of social disruption as an inevitable cost of resilience. Employing a political ecology lens, the paper argues that the mapping’s silences reveal structural biases mainly through adaptation becoming a tool of state territorialization and donor driven control over vulnerable deltaic landscapes, rather than a site of social justice or community centered transformation. The result is a reproduction and in some case intensification of existing patterns of marginalization under the guise of climate resilience.