Women鈥檚 Livelihoods in Vulnerable Coastlines

Investigating differentiated vulnerability among coastline resident women of the Bay of Bengal Delta, including intra-household inequalities, endemic health, migration and livelihood risks.

16 September 2024

Project overview

This project builds on long-standing ethnographic fieldwork in the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal Delta, a region home to 7.7 million inhabitants living alongside the Sundarbans, the world鈥檚 largest contiguous mangrove forest. By exploring men's and women鈥檚 motivations and triggers for migrating out and the positionality of those 鈥渓eft behind鈥� in villages, the research investigates differentiated vulnerability among Sundarbans residents.

The Sundarbans is a region that has been endemic to cyclones, storm surges and flooding. Submergence has been a feature of the land historically. It is a low-lying region, 3 meters above mean sea level, but high tides go up to 5 meters. Out-migration often understood as motivated by climate change, is instead because of economic precarity and the lack of livelihoods resulting from a climate of poor governance. This research聽moves in new directions by complicating the reductive relationship between ongoing agrarian and climate migration to proposing alternative discourses of displacement, mobility and migration that foreground pre-existing socio-environmental vulnerabilities. 聽聽

Methodologically, the research is multi-sited and uses mixed methods combining qualitative research, household surveys, worksite surveys as well as multi-hazard maps and coastal risk assessments. It entails following the journeys of men and women who migrate out of coastal villages to factory shop floors and construction sites, documenting the risks and hazards of working in the informal economy as well as tracing the social history of commodities that migrants are an integral part of manufacturing. In coastal villages hugging the Sundarbans, the research seeks to differentiate the notion of a 鈥渃oastline鈥� by focussing on the forms of experiential knowledge that emerges through living in the proximity of different kinds of water bodies that compose a coastline. This entails investigating gendered forms of coastline knowledge specific to the ecology of the Sundarbans, but with relevance to coastal populations in other parts of the world facing similar contestations at the intersection of conservation, climate-related risks, and poverty.

Challenge being addressed

As coastlines erode, several government and non-government organisations have begun processes to gradually depopulate significant parts of the coastal peripheries across the world through what is termed a 鈥淧lanned Retreat鈥� or a 鈥淢anaged Relocation.鈥� Simultaneously, many millions are migrating without government support, motivated by economic distress and the lack of access to basic infrastructures of health, education, and employment. The issue of mobility and immobility or those that are often referred to as 鈥渢rapped鈥� populations will become one of the most urgent challenges of the next decades. Disasters, as we know, are socially constructed events which are the product of the impact of a natural hazard on people whose vulnerability has been created by social, economic and political conditions. As a result, the point at which a coastline becomes uninhabitable cannot be generalised and is dependent on the place, on histories of adaptation, mobility and forms of governance.聽

In investigating gendered forms of migration, this research seeks to investigate what coastal residents find meaningful about their lives and futures. This includes not just material and physical infrastructures but also relations to land, water, forests, intangible cultural heritage, skills, rituals, customs, kinship networks and people鈥檚 identities as they are embedded to and gain vitality from specific land-water ecologies.

Aims and objectives

Policymakers, outsiders, and 鈥榚xperts鈥� promote a range of climate adaptation measures with a particular set of priorities and notions of risks. The聽research foregrounds the priorities of residents of the Bengal Delta, with a much wider definition of risk and danger that does not pertain solely to climate change. Through qualitative research methods, the research aims聽to investigate what different communities鈥攄isaggregated generationally and through gender鈥攑erceive as a life of dignity and well-being as they weigh the options (or lack thereof) of migrating, relocating, or remaining in their villages and cities.

One of the aims of this project is to propose an alternative to homogenous understandings of the risks faced by men, women, and girls by investigating firstly, differentiated vulnerability through gender disaggregated data. I pay attention to livelihood risk, health hazards, as well as marriage and sex trafficking (which often takes place under the euphemism of marriage) as well as women鈥檚 elopement and abandonment, with climate-induced displacement, coastal erosion, and migration as the backdrop to these shifts within families and households.

皇家华人