Climate change is making traditional pathways to upward mobility difficult in climate-vulnerable regions, but social understandings of these changes lag behind lived realities. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic data from the Sundarbans mangrove forest of Bangladesh, this paper examines families’ everyday adaptations: their short-, medium-, and long-term goals and strategies to thrive in spite of climate change. We argue that strategies that emphasize individual asset accumulation increase climate vulnerability, whereas strategies that emphasize collective and place-based knowledge are more successful at providing economic security. In particular, families pursuing entrepreneurship and land ownership face repeated climate-related losses and debt cycles, while those accessing collective wage labor, NGO employment, and skill-based innovations demonstrate greater resilience and wealth accumulation. But even when families understand that collective, risk-sharing strategies work better than individual accumulation, they are not always able to act on this understanding, as they remain constrained by traditional practices, long-standing development models, and economic structures that force them toward vulnerable, market-dependent livelihoods. This article traces how local people’s own understanding of mobility is confronted with barriers in an age of climate-arrested development.
Sen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.