Camelia Dewan

Award-Winning Environmental Anthropologist Examining Climate Discourse in Aid Projects

Associate Professor Camelia Dewan is an environmental anthropologist focusing on aid work and coastal areas in Bangladesh. Her monograph Misreading the Bengal Delta, demonstrates how climate change is increasingly used as a buzzword to attract funding—and describes how this can lead to projects that exacerbating environmental problems rather than preparing the country for impending climatic changes. Recently, her book was awarded one of the most prestigious international prizes in environmental humanities.

It was after working on a water project in Bangladesh and India in 2011 that Camelia first came into her field of research.

- There, I became aware of the political conflicts surrounding both flood protection embankments and brackish tiger-prawn cultivation. I wanted to investigate these conflicts more closely by applying for a PhD programme. A colleague with experience in applying for funding for large international projects said that if I added ‘climate change’ to my project title, regardless of what I wanted to do, I would get funding. And he was right. It made me start thinking about how to understand the complex causal relationships between different processes involved in climate change, if they are reduced to a spice or a buzzword.

The doctoral position was funded by a Bloomsbury PhD Studentship at the University of London, where Camelia had dual affiliations in both History at Birkbeck College and Social Anthropology at SOAS.

-Through this dual focus, I did a lot of archival research on topics such as embankments before doing my fieldwork. This was useful for continuing to search for historical traces in the field and resulted in an interdisciplinary dissertation with a strong environmental history component.

Open Access Book Prize

The dissertation has been turned into the monograph Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate change, development and livelihoods in coastal Bangladesh. The book was recently awarded the prestigious ACLS Open Access Book Prize from the American Council of Learned Societies. On October 22, 2025, Camelia attended the award ceremony at the New York Public Library.

-It was a magical experience. They want to encourage researchers to publish Open Access by creating an exclusive award ceremony that almost feels like winning the Nobel Prize. It was incredibly honourable to discuss my book and those of the other award winners in a panel discussion with journalist Beth Daley from The Conversation. As a full-time working mother of two young children, it was a luxurious break from everyday life to travel and stay in the heart of Manhattan.

In her book, Camelia uses Mike Hulme's concept of ‘climate reductionism’ to highlight the narrative that all environmental changes are caused by climate change. She combines this with Bruno Latour's use of ‘translation’ to describe how different interests are brought together in a project. Camelia's own concept of ‘climate reductive translations’ refers to how aid projects and research agendas translate their actions to fit into the discourse on climate change. Sometimes the measures are in line with local needs, sometimes not. The book provides various examples of such climate reductive translations and their effects.

-Each chapter has historical sections where I show that it has long been known that flood embankments cause rivers to die and leave those who live nearby very vulnerable. Nevertheless, embankments have begun to be packaged as infrastructure for climate adaptation. The same applies to tiger prawn farming, which some American actors promote as good for climate change. In this way, they can continue to exert the violence that these farms have been inflicting on the land, biodiversity, and the health of the population since the 1980s. This is a strong criticism that I am making. In the book, I have oral accounts from older informants and ethnographic vignettes about how they are affected by sedimentation, including what they think about it.

Camelia raises the issue that the entire question of environmental problems has been reduced to being solely about carbon dioxide.

-The focus on carbon dioxide has led to an equally one-sided focus on techno-fixes and individual responsibility. These problems are too big for an individual to do anything about; it becomes overwhelming. Buying an electric car doesn't help, even if it emits less carbon dioxide. There are violent consequences also of renewable energy. These ‘solutions’ are often connected to capitalist interests, that are not locally adapted and anchored. We need to take a more complex view of the problem.

What do you think about that the public debate often ends up focusing on whether or not climate change exists?

-I actually wanted the book to be called “Misreading Climate Change,” but the publisher was afraid of misunderstandings and that it would be taken up by climate deniers. It is very clear in the book that climate change is real and how I see it affecting Bangladesh. What I object to is that climate change is used in such a way that it means everything and nothing. This allows companies and authorities to continue with greenwashing and fake green transitions. We are poisoning ourselves and our planet through the extraction of metals, the manufacture of plastics, and the consumption of clothing and electronics. It is not about being for or against climate change; it has become such a corrupt discourse.

Camelia distinguishes between “climatic changes” as a description or index of changes, compared to “climate change” as a discourse or knowledge production with causal agency.

-Instead, I want to talk about human causes that affect people's livelihoods and local ecology. Then it is possible to find solutions that correspond to experiences on the ground. It is with these locally rooted perspectives that anthropologists have the most to contribute. If you break down the concept of climate change into what it actually is, such as irregular rainfall and heat waves, there are often traditional local ways of dealing with it. But these methods have been phased out in the name of modernity or development. For example, we can look at how we work and live. Is it reasonable to work eight hours when it is hottest in the middle of the day? There is a reason why warmer countries have had siestas. The book takes a decolonized and historical perspective on how modernity and development have been exported to former colonies, and shows the various ways in which such ideas have caused devastating damage.

Camelia highlights the importance of utilizing emic concepts, that is, how informants themselves describe things, and of being attentive to what discourses from colonialism remain alive. In the book, she argues that modern agriculture, for example, is a major environmental problem, with artificial fertilizers destroying biodiversity in the soil.

-In Bangladesh, there are two different concepts that describe this. One is Shakti, the mother goddess, who is also described as the power of the earth and the soil. I describe how microorganisms can be understood as shakti and how cow manure is teeming with life. Informants say that if you eat food with shakti, you absorb it. Otherwise, you get sick. That is where they see the connection between food and health. This connection also exists in the second concept, which is bhejal. It roughly means impure food that has been tampered with and can make you sick. People are very concerned about this. When I was there in 2015, a child died of formaldehyde poisoning after eating mango. I will be investigating this in my new project, Toxic Foods, which is funded by Formas.

The negative side of development

Camelia thinks that the concept of development is still seen as very positive in Sweden, despite the fact that there is a lot of English-language literature that discusses how development has been used as a pretext to deprive populations of power and rights.

-Swedish actors working abroad should be more responsive to local perspectives; it is not certain that Swedish solutions will work. Many people working in the field know this, but aid donors in Sweden are not as aware. This is an important perspective that I highlight when I teach on the Master's program in humanitarian action and conflict.

Instead of focusing on “developing” other societies, Camelia believes that we should look at the framework of the Swedish welfare system.

-Bangladesh is not just a victim. It is one of the world's largest producers of textiles, including for H&M. The textile industry exploits people and nature on a massive scale, while paying very little back to Bangladesh in the form of taxes. If Sweden is to export any model, it should be our progressive taxation system, even though it has been greatly eroded in recent years. Because with that system, citizens are not required to pay for healthcare and education out of their own pockets.

It is precisely these costs and the difficulties they cause in people's lives that Camelia writes about in the last chapter of Misreading the Bengal Delta.

-A lot of it has to do with the high cost of healthcare and schooling. These things are not included in aid money. I was told several times that I should not include that chapter because it is not about climate adaptation projects like the other chapters. But this is what is most important to my informants. What is anthropology if we don't include what is most important to our informants, but only focus on being able to present a coherent theory to academics? Not listening to people's actual everyday (environmental) problems is one of the dangers of the climate discourse, Camelia concludes.

Text: Jennie Sjödin, year 2025