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This multidisciplinary work analyses challenges to sustainable development amidst rapidly changing climate in the world's largest delta - the Sundarbans. Empirical evidence unpacks grounded vulnerabilities and reveals their temporal socio-economic impacts. A novel concept of 'everyday disasters' is proposed - supported by data and photographic evidence - that contests institutional disaster definition. Then it uncovers how the geopolitics of ecological governance and its hegemonic discourse dominate local policies, which in turn fail to address local socio-ecological concerns, adaptation needs and development aspirations. Absence of local vocabularies, cognitive values and socio-cultural contexts along with spatially constricted, exclusionary, top-down techno-science approaches further escalate knowledge-action gaps. Deconstruction of multiscalar conflicts between the global rhetoric and transformative postcolonial geographies offers an ethical, Southern perspective of sustainability.
List of contents
Part I. 'Devil' in the deep blue sea?: 1. Warming world, threatened poor.- 2. Recipe of a disaster: Peripheral lives in the epicentre of changing climate.- Part II. Digging deep: Evidence and Empiricism: 3. Dusting the layers: Evolution of vulnerabilities.- 4. Is Science Sacred?.- 5. Discursive dissonance in socio-ecological theatre.- 6. Are comments free? Where consents manufacture.- Part III. Joining the Isles: 7. For the comfortably numb: Conclusion summary.- Postscript.- Reference.
About the author
Aditya Ghosh graduated with a PhD from the University of Heidelberg and has studied at the University of Sussex, University of Calcutta, University of Mumbai, and the University of Lincoln. Aditya specializes in sustainable development, climate change and socio-ecological systems.
Summary
This multidisciplinary work analyses challenges to sustainable development amidst rapidly changing climate in the world’s largest delta – the Sundarbans. Empirical evidence unpacks grounded vulnerabilities and reveals their temporal socio-economic impacts. A novel concept of ‘everyday disasters’ is proposed – supported by data and photographic evidence – that contests institutional disaster definition. Then it uncovers how the geopolitics of ecological governance and its hegemonic discourse dominate local policies, which in turn fail to address local socio-ecological concerns, adaptation needs and development aspirations. Absence of local vocabularies, cognitive values and socio-cultural contexts along with spatially constricted, exclusionary, top-down techno-science approaches further escalate knowledge-action gaps. Deconstruction of multiscalar conflicts between the global rhetoric and transformative postcolonial geographies offers an ethical, Southern perspective of sustainability.
