Contesting inevitable salinity: Brackish aquaculture, cyclonic vulnerabilities and the politics of Delta planning in coastal Bangladesh

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork on Bangladesh's southwest coastal zone to problematise the ways in which ‘climate reductive translations’ of salinity ignore the politically embedded violence of tiger-prawn cultivation. Such brackish aquaculture is enabled through installation of pipes and sluice gates to inundate previously arable lands with saline water during the dry season. These damaging interventions undermine the structural integrity of embankment infrastructure, making them more vulnerable to collapse during cyclones and tidal surges. Yet, capitalist actors who engage in export-oriented tiger-prawn cultivation attribute salinity in Bangladesh's coastal areas to climate change, which renders invisible their own role in contributing to soil salinity, environmental degradation, and migration in the wake of cyclones. This article forms part of a collection of essays discussing how governments and other stakeholders around the world have developed initiatives to define, assess, and plan for coastal futures. I argue that a climate reductive translation of salinity attributed to a future of rising sea levels overlooks long-standing, historically-situated political, economic, and infrastructural choices exacerbating salinity. Such omission of context is particularly visible in the Dutch Adaptive Delta Management approach exported to Bangladesh, which fails to address not only the infrastructural causes of siltation, but also the political economy of violent brackish aquaculture that exacerbates salinity and cyclonic vulnerabilities in the country it seeks to ‘help’.