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Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta's imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh's southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see the delta's rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. Jason Cons explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the often surprising entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits, and more. These future visions produce the delta as a "climate frontier," a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta's climate-affected future.
“Cons takes us on a journey into the heart of the Bengal delta, where alternate futures of peril and promise gain traction within the ‘multidimensional complexity’ of cultural repertoires, social histories, and geopolitical contentions shaping everyday lives—the result is a rich narrative account of the region's ‘material ecology and politics’
"The book's thoughtful conceptual and insightful theoretical offerings are incredibly valuable for anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists engaged in larger considerations of the agrarian question of climate change."
“Delta Futures is an elegant reminder that the future is never singular, but always plural, contested, and captured in the messy terrains of the present.”