What are the connections between ‘risk’ and ‘gender’ in interventions related to climate change in Bangladesh’s coastal regions? When it comes to women and climate change, what are the implications of framing women as uniquely ‘vulnerable’?
In this article, the author examines climate change adaptation through a particular project in the context of Bangladesh’s coastal areas, through research in both Dhaka and the coastal Barguna district.
Check out the abstract below, and then click through to the main article to learn more:
Women as subjects of risk in Bangladesh’s coastal riskscapes
Peer-reviewed research by: Kathinka Fossum Evertsen
In this article, I examine the assumptions underlying the idea of women as vulnerable and at risk, and how this understanding contributes to shaping practices of climate change adaptation. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the expert community in Dhaka and in a climate change adaptation field site in coastal Bangladesh. Following Ananya Roy’s work, I understand coastal Bangladesh to be a riskscape, a geographical space suffused with imaginations of anticipated risks that must be managed through disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Roy further argues that riskscapes create new subjects of risk, and that such subjects are highly gendered because development has tended to focus on poor women ‘in very specific ways’.
In this article, I build on Roy’s insights to explore how women are constructed as ‘subjects of risk’ in climate change adaptation. I also show how climate change adaptation, in becoming the new buzzword for development, continues to focus on poor women in very specific ways, which are applied to fit with the climate change ‘metacode’. While well-intended, the understanding of women as subjects of risk is imbued with ambivalence, because it may contribute to supporting structures that make women vulnerable by normalizing relations of risk.
Click here to read the full open-access article, published in 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal The Sociological Review.
Full Reference //
Evertsen, K. F. (2023). Women as subjects of risk in Bangladesh’s coastal riskscapes. The Sociological Review, 71(5), 1154-1171.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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