Women as subjects of risk in Bangladesh’s coastal riskscapes

Abstract

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.