Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ecological Governance and the Dynamics of Risk and Resilience

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Efforts to understand the dynamics of risk and resilience in response to catastrophic environmental events often tend to focus on populations living in low-lying coastal areas vulnerable to rising sea levels. As a result, these communities have increasingly tended to become laboratories for developing methods of governance to best manage, measure, and account for potentially hazardous atmospheric phenomena. Many of these communities, however, have long had to cope with and develop effective decision-making regimes in response to such seasonal weather effects. This project, which trains a graduate student in conducting rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, explores the interaction between the practices and knowledge that has been circulated among coastal residents and meteorologists, and the more recent apparatus of ecological governance that has been instituted in such contexts of climatic vulnerability. The project would also enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating findings to organizations, officials, and scientists engaged in identifying effective models for assessing and coping with risk associated with catastrophic environmental events. Dilshanie Perera, under the supervision of Dr. Sharika Thiranagama of Stanford University, will explore how meteorological knowledge is produced and circulated in a context where weather-borne disaster are regularly experienced. To do so, this project focuses on the statistical abstraction of climate through the tangible experience of weather at a human scale. The research takes place in Bangladesh, a low-lying deltaic country that faces seasonal storms, monsoon rains, cyclones, and flooding on a yearly basis. Now heralded as the epicenter of climate change, Bangladesh has become a laboratory for global development initiatives trying to pioneer climate relief efforts. As climate change becomes the primary justification for organizational and state intervention into people's lives and livelihoods along the southwest coast, top-down ways of articulating risk in the idiom of climate tend to obscure the experiences of those who have been living with environmental uncertainty in unstable landscapes for generations. This research strives to analyze what the everyday experience of living with potentially catastrophic weather entails. By asking how a new regime of ecological risk takes discursive, programmatic, and material form in Bangladesh, this study explores how knowledge about weather is produced at various scales, as well as how weather is framed a problem of governance and management. By conducting ethnographic research with Bangladesh state meteorologists, coastal farmers, local government officials, and development practitioners, this project will contribute new ways of analyzing environmental governance and social life amid conditions saturated by the recurrent possibility of disaster.