Decolonize Bangladesh’s Dominant Environmentalism

Authors: Efadul Huq, Samira Bashar
Published: June 24, 2025

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A few months ago, we came across an article titled “The biggest wetland in Dhaka nobody knows about” in the Daily Star. The title of the article shocked us! Who doesn’t know about that wetland of the Turag River? Do the people who have lived with the wetlands for generations, farming and fishing in the area, not know? Do activists who have been fighting to protect the wetlands not know? Do the residents of Dhaka’s western edge not know? Whose public consciousness has missed the wetlands?

Both of us have been working with wetlands, rivers, fisher communities, and environmentalists in Dhaka and Chattogram for several years now. In the course of exchanging notes on our working experiences in different parts of Bangladesh, we have noticed the overwhelming presence and celebration of elite environmentalism which floats disconnected from social-ecological rootedness across the eastern Bengal Delta. For outsiders to environmental debates, our shock might seem disproportionate. However, as queer-feminist political ecologists and critical urban planners, we choose to dwell on this subtlety because it is the tip of the internalized coloniality of Bangladesh’s dominant environmentalism. The romanticized and universalist approach we have towards environmental issues reveals the class and caste biases baked into the dominant discussions on urban environments.

Hence, contesting environmentalism’s coloniality in Bangladesh is more crucial for us now than ever before. The claim that “nobody knows about” Turag’s wetlands does what colonial knowledge producers have often done. Namely, they ignore and erase existing and pre-existing riverine cultures, knowledge, and lifemaking. They create discovery narratives about finding new places that nobody has seen before so that these people-less places can be planned, designed, and settled however the colonial state and its planners, architects, and bureaucrats desire. Such ‘discovery’ is the denial of what is already known: a scenario worse than the erasure of the wetlands from the environment itself. It is an erasure of people’s relationship with water, the erasure of their placemaking practices around water, and the erasure of their collective memories, cultures, and lived experiences.

Such erasures of histories, memories, and relationships are not isolated cases, but are elements of an enduring global discourse. Across geographies, we see eco-coloniality manifest in different ways. In Canada, for instance, settler urbanism has long relied on the systemic erasure of indigenous peoples’ relations to land and water (see Georgeson and Hallenbeck, 2018). In Australia, colonial legal doctrines like aqua nullius continue to displace Aboriginal water governance practices (Marshall, 2017). And in both the United States and India, conservation and preservationist discourses construct parks and wildlife reserves that erase Indigenous people from their ancestral territories under the guise of protecting “nature” (see Ranganajan, 2013; Reid, 2021).

Bangladesh’s dominant environmentalism, reproduced by architects, planners, bureaucrats, NGOs, media, and researchers, misses the local people’s agency in crafting their own environmentalism rooted in their nuanced, intimate, and situated understanding of the environment. Such dominant discussions on environmentalism have internalized a colonial  sensibility that reproduces an epistemic erasure – the erasure of collective memories, knowledge, and lived experiences of classed and casted local people and communities. By internalizing colonial spatial ordering and commodification of nature, dominant environmentalism hence often succumbs to technocratic, designed, engineered solutions to more sophisticated and highly contested political questions, rights claims, and socio-spatial terrains. Ours is an insistence on decolonizing Bangladeshi environmentalism’s dominant discourse and imagination. Decolonizing this form of elite environmentalism calls for acknowledging and reflecting on our complicity in epistemic violence.

Decolonizing, that is attentive to our complicities, is more than a practice of critique and reflection. It is an insurgent orientation toward political futuring or prefiguring—one that reclaims planning, environmental knowledge, and memory from the logics of dispossession. It involves making space for radically different epistemologies and practices that emerge from the daily lifeworlds of riverine communities. It engages in (re)making worlds through insurgent knowledge-making modalities such as counter-mapping (see Sletto et al., 2020) and living archival practices (see Ortiz et al, 2023 and Sabiescu, 2020).

After ‘discovering’, when it comes to ‘naming’ and ‘planning’ the unknown elements, dominant environmentalism again commits epistemic violence by reiterating and resorting only to colonial-era histories and epistemologies. In the referred article, for example, the author takes inspiration from imperial cartographic projects (that had no intention to benefit the Bengal Delta’s inhabitants) and names the wetland “Sharoboriya”. Why not call the wetlands what it is called now by the people who live there? At present, locals know the area as Goran Chotbari Area, and the wetland is under the Public Works Department’s management. Four different mouzas constitute the wetland, and the PWD acquired the area during the land acquisition process during the Ershad regime. Before this, families like the Mollahs and Matbors fished and managed the wetlands for generations. The wetlands extended up to Mirpur, and other villages dwelled in the wetlands too. Dominant environmentalist discourses bury these histories and neglect the placemaking practices of Turag’s riverside communities in favor of colonial knowledge producers.

Iftekhar Iqbal (2010) and Debjani Bhattacharya (2018) have explained at length that at the heart of colonial planning and mapping of controlled territories were property thinking and capital accumulation. Pick almost any large-scale environmental intervention or proposal in Bangladesh, and one can see these patterns. The top-down environmental planning processes, especially around water in Bangladesh, stubbornly reinforce colonial legacies of understanding and imagining the environment and people’s relationship to it. Projects aimed at ‘saving the environment’ are designed through a totalizing lens of modernity and development. The planning rationalities coming down from the top, from the experts of our built environment, are mostly imbued with the desire to make urban environments modern, uniform, homogenized, and consumable to affluent segments of urban populations and interests.

There is nothing inherently wrong with engaging with historical archives. However, we take issue with how colonial cartography is already always taken for granted as authentic and authoritative. In the case of Bengal, Rennell, the famous mapmaker, wrote how local informants refused to share knowledge with him or even turned hostile during his map-making projects in Bengal and Bihar (Chatterjee, 2021). Rennell admitted that his maps probably carry various inaccuracies. Yet, we see repeated redeployments of Rennel’s old maps as authoritative knowledge for understanding Bangladesh’s waterways (see, for example, Banerjee, 2020; Ety and Rashid, 2020; Ashraf, 2022).

A corollary of this form of uncritical and unchallenged view of wetlands prompts us to perceive wetlands as an ‘ecological resource’ with ‘natural assets’. Such a way of looking turns wetlands into resources, and it exemplifies how living and breathing worlds are turned into resources under the colonial gaze for exploitation and capital accumulation. This is the active translation of our entangled relationships, histories, and living ecologies into mere “resources”, a process that renders water and land legible only as commodities to be exploited.

Another question that gains significance here is: who is ‘worthy’ of accessing that which is deemed a  ‘resource’ and who are the ‘encroachers’ and/or ‘destroyers’ (read: residents of informal settlements) of those. In response, comes the suggestion that the wetlands need to be surrounded by a park that urban consumers can access and enjoy–this in the name of ‘public welfare’ and ‘protecting wetlands’. We don’t deny the need for rivers and wetlands as accessible open public spaces in crowded cities of Bangladesh, but why do we ignore the interests and needs of waterside communities who have been environmental stewards of those wetlands for decades and generations? What about their access to wetlands, rivers, and seas?

The colonial approach is replicated across the waterfronts in Bangladesh. From the Hatirjheel-Begunbari Lake project in Dhaka to the Karnaphuli Riverfront Development project in Chattogram, wetlands and waterfronts are continually being subjected to development targeted mostly to serve the interests of ‘the public’ (read: urban elite and consumer classes). These environmental improvement initiatives reveal the elite biases entrenched in their logics of ‘protection’ of the wetlands or the urban park through the erasure of certain groups of publics from these spaces (see Coelho, 2020; Doshi, 2013 a,b; Doshi and Ranganathan, 2017; Baviskar, 2001, 2012, 2020). In effect, this logic and narrative simultaneously erase the colonial state’s complicity in the exploitation and destruction of wetlands—an erasure that perpetuates the cycle of environmental injustices (see Liboiron, 2021).  Globally, we have seen how urban riverfront development leads to displacement by gentrification and systemic dispossession. Such proposals are also premised on epistemic erasures and violence against riverine and waterside communities, whose stories, dreams, and interests simply are unheard in these ‘hydrophilic’ visions of urban nature.

Such projects are formulated and executed without involving diverse classed and casted communities. These hydrophilic projects are often premised on technical, engineered solutions and entail concretization through the construction of embankments for the sake of aestheticization and environmental protection, as seen in the Patenga Sea Beach Development Project in Chattogram. The design processes reinforce the land-water dichotomy and boundary making that colonial mapping projects once perpetuated, failing to capture the agency of the water and wetlands that continues to invalidate such boundaries (see Mathur and Da Cunha, 2009). The processes also fail to capture the nuanced meanings and interbeing relationships embedded in the flows and rhythms of deltaic ecology. Such aestheticized projects, we argue, remain limited in use, segregatory in nature, and highly inequitable in their essence. Not surprisingly, they are often unsustainable from environmental protection and resilience perspectives.

The extractive, colonial cartographic gaze manifests in cartographic form through the proposed schematic idea for the future of the wetland, too. The bird’s eye view of the wetland, superimposed with a totalizing, ordered understanding of ‘redevelopment’ delineated through the arbitrarily drawn strokes on the Google image in terms of ‘public park’ and ‘elevated walkways’, imposes an authoritative and undemocratic spatial imaginary. This imaginary erases a certain group of the public and their uses of the wetland and surrounding spaces, and inscribes the space with control, territoriality, and consumption. This sort of cartographic positivism marginalizes other geographic and socio-spatial lived realities and the humans and non-humans who live in those realities daily, and further feeds into the system of exclusionary, elitist planning realms of Bangladesh.

A Cartographic Agitation

We want to agitate this cartographically exclusionary conceptualization of our environment.

Inspired by Begum Rokeya’s feminist futurism, we share here a co-created “map from the future” to reimagine urban wetland fishing communities in Dhaka as vital infrastructure (first published in Huq & Suhi, 2025). Drawing from fieldwork, memories, and conversations with fisherfolk along the Balu River, the map weaves together visions of social-ecological renewal and equity. It invites you, the reader, to envision an infrastructure composed of relationships between fisherfolk, rivers, and wetlands—a kaleidoscope of social and material infrastructure of hands, soils, eyes, nets, and waters that traverses the seasons of the Bengal delta.

The counter-map we offer here emerges from a process of relational fieldwork, conversations, memory work, and imagination—a humble attempt to center riverine lifeworlds and resist dominant cartographic authority. To prepare this artifact, we started with our immediate experiences of visiting the rivers and wetlands of eastern Dhaka and dug into our early memories. We drew from our conversations with the fishing communities, particularly their everyday stories. We spent time discussing the history of the Bengal delta. We contemplated how we, as urban Dhaka’s educated residents, are positioned with regard to the fishing communities in the current urban political economy. The green and blue wetlands with settlements and roads, therefore, emerge powerfully. The two-dimensional Google map, barely visible, persists as one layer of history. By representing the everyday practices of fishing communities, we offer a way of looking that is not a bird’s eye view. What human looks at the world like a bird? We see people fishing, making choi nets, and selling fish in the market. We see quilt weavers and net-makers as they watch over cows and goats that graze in the wetlands.

The vantage points we offer, serve as an invitation to pay attention to people’s relationships with the Balu and its wetlands. This map fragment also tells specific truths about specific sites. In this settlement, the school is critical to the fishing community because the school committee decides the fishing bids. The money generated from the fishing bid is used to renovate the mosque, another prominent representation in the fragment. Collective development projects such as mosque construction hold the fishing community together in a shared purpose. The dredging machine tells how developers have violated the wetlands and dumped sand in these areas. But in 2050, the dredger obeys the fishing community’s desire and works to move the sand away to free the Balu and its wetlands. The group of men talking to a city authority representative, perhaps a planner or architect, indicates a future where the fisherfolk’s participation plays an indispensable role in Dhaka’s planning.

Far from making a claim to capture all the stories and dynamics present at these sites, we remain open to further interpretations and extensions of the map.

As we share our vision of Dhaka, we move past the dualities of urban vs. rural. While acknowledging the dense urbanity of Dhaka (the gray apartments), the green and blue wetlands with settlements and roads, therefore, emerge powerfully. Our map challenges dominant planning by foregrounding ecological entanglements and collective agency. It imagines a future where dredging respects the community’s will, and fisherfolk co-govern city development. Though partial, the map invites multiple interpretations. It is a counter-map of care and recognition. An invitation to reorient Dhaka’s planning toward justice.

Decolonizing also calls for a different approach to archives—one that foregrounds living, embodied, and relational histories over extractive and exclusionary colonial archives. Our counter-mapping practice doubles as a form of living archiving: stories, drawings, and sensory memories layered together to preserve what was, is, and what could be. This contrasts sharply with colonial archives, which seek fixity, control, and classification. Community-led efforts like the Turag Fishing Mutual Aid offer possibilities for reimagining archiving. In the case of Turag’s fishing communities, oral memory, ecological practice, and shared rituals serve as vital repositories of knowledge (Huq & Azaz, 2024; Huq, Li, & Azaz, 2023). Living archives, as we understand them, are not nostalgic—they are insurgent, generative, and open to revision. They offer planners and environmentalists a more ethical and grounded approach to documenting and imagining space.

The work of decolonizing contemporary environmentalist discourses demands that we burst the bubbles of expert research, design, and academia. To do this, we must acknowledge the agency of communities and recognize their epistemic privilege—the unique, situated knowledge they hold about their own environments. Co-producing knowledge with these communities becomes an ethical and political imperative rather than a mere participatory add-on. We must look to practices such as the Ponchobot Andolon, co-creative projects like the Urban River Spaces in Jhenaidah, and translocal solidarity projects like Turag Fishing Community Mutual Aid rather than drawing inspiration from colonial, racial-capitalist discourses. We must learn from place-based histories and narratives to avoid the pitfalls of false and domineering universalism. At the same time, we must also offer meaningful analysis and democratizing strategies to guide transformative planning interventions for new horizons of Bangladeshi urbanism.

 

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to Lalitha Kamath for her invaluable feedback and encouragement. We also thank the AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges editorial collective, particularly Richa Nagar, for the generous guidance and thoughtful suggestions throughout the writing process.

 

Suggested Citation:

Huq, E. and Bashar, S. 2024. “Decolonize Bangladesh’s Dominant Environmentalism.” AGITATE! Now: https://agitatejournal.org/decolonize-bangladeshs-dominant-environmentalism/

 

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