Narrating the Anthropocene in the Delta under Authoritarian Development: A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Eco-political Transformation Discourse
Keywords:
Anthropocene, authoritarian development, Bangladesh Delta, discourse analysis, eco-politicsAbstract
In the era of the Anthropocene, where human activity increasingly defines planetary change, this study examines how the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100, the state’s flagship strategy for climate resilience and development, constructs and circulates eco-political narratives through a corpus of 1803169 tokens drawn from official government reports published between 2018 and 2019. Drawing on corpus-driven methods, including network, concordance, and n-gram analysis, the paper interrogates the textual architecture to uncover how the state mobilizes language to legitimize particular forms of governance. The findings show the dominance of managerial and technocratic framings in its eco-political discourse. Networks link governance and efficiency with ecological keywords, recasting climate threats as solvable through centralized implementation and expert consensus. Concordance patterns expose spatial hierarchies: drought-prone regions are framed as peripheral zones needing intervention, while “urban and rural” pairings suggest inclusivity yet obscure uneven resource distribution. These textual strategies reinforce anticipatory development logics that privilege national modernization. N-gram analysis further shows how economic rationalities permeate sustainability language, signaling a shift toward neoliberal governance. Water resilience is reframed as a cost-recovery issue, not a collective right, revealing how Anthropocene vulnerabilities are mobilized to justify market-based solutions and entrench unequal access to protection and resources. Moreover, this study situates Bangladesh’s delta discourse within global debates on authoritarian development, eco-political transformation, and post-political environmentalism, showing how crisis rhetoric legitimizes centralized, market-driven governance. While limited to official texts, the research calls for future works incorporating grassroots and civil society narratives to foreground more pluralistic, climate-just, and democratically inclusive pathways toward sustainability in the Anthropocene.
Downloads
References
Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. Continuum.
Bebbington, A., Abdulai, A.-G., Bebbington, D. H., Hinfelaar, M., & Sanborn, C. A. (2018). Governing extractive industries: Politics, histories, ideas. Oxford University Press.
Beeson, M. (2010). The coming of environmental authoritarianism. Environmental Politics, 19(2), 276-294. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010903576918
Blühdorn, I., & Welsh, I. (2007). Eco-politics beyond the paradigm of sustainability: A conceptual framework and research agenda. Environmental Politics, 16(2), 185-205. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010701211650
Cavanagh, C. J., & Himmelfarb, D. (2015). “Much in blood and money”: Necropolitical ecology on the margins of the Uganda Protectorate. Antipode, 47(1), 55-73. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12093
Chan, N. W., Roy, R., & Chaffin, B. C. (2016). Water governance in Bangladesh: An Evaluation of Institutional and Political Context. Water, 8(9), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.3390/w8090403
Dijk, T. A. V. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 249-283. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926593004002006
Dryzek, J. S. (2013). The politics of the earth: Environmental discourses (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Dryzek, J. S., & Pickering, J. (2019). The politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford University Press.
Ernoul, L., & Wardell-Johnson, A. (2015). Environmental discourses: Understanding the implications on ICZM protocol implementation in two Mediterranean deltas. Ocean & Coastal Management, 103, 97-108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2014.11.014
Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (1993). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.
Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 87-104). The University of Chicago Press.
Ginkel, R. V. (2007). Gentle giants, barbaric beasts and whale warriors: Contentious traditions, eco-political discourse and identity politics. MAST, 6(1), 9-43.
Hajer, M. A. (1995). The politics of environmental discourse: Ecological modernization and the policy process. Clarendon Press.
Jensen, C. B., & Morita, A. (2020). Deltas in crisis: From systems to sophisticated conjunctions. Sustainability, 12(4), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12041322
Kwan, J. (2025). The eco-political wrongs of colonialism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2025.2528389
Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. Polity.
Lövbrand, E., Mobjörk, M., & Söder, R. (2020). The Anthropocene and the geo-political imagination: Re-writing Earth as political space. Earth System Governance, 4, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2020.100051
Nie, Y., Cheng, D., & Liu, K. (2020). The effectiveness of environmental authoritarianism: Evidence from China’s administrative inquiry for environmental protection. Energy Economics, 88, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2020.104777
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.
Paprocki, K. (2018). Threatening dystopias: Development and adaptation regimes in Bangladesh. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108(4), 955-973. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1406330
Simpson, M. (2020). The Anthropocene as colonial discourse. EPD: Society and Space, 38(1), 53-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818764679
Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36(8), 614-621.
Sultana, F. (2022). Critical climate justice. The Geographical Journal, 188, 118-125. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12417
Swyngedouw, E. (2010). Apocalypse forever? Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2-3), 213-232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409358728
Syvitski, J. P. M., Kettner, A. J., Overeem, I., Hutton, E. W. H., Hannon, M. T., Brakenridge, G. R., Day, J., Vörösmarty, C., Saito, Y., Giosan, L., & Nicholls, R. J. (2009). Sinking deltas due to human activities. Nature Geoscience, 2, 681-686. https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo629
Teampău, P. (2020). Trouble in paradise: Competing discourses and complex governance in the Romanian Danube Delta. Marine Policy, 112, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2019.103522
Thakur, S., & Jayaram, D. (2024). Resilience in the Anthropocene: discourses of development, climate change, and security in South Asia. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 67, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101425
Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus linguistics at work. John Benjamins.
Zhu, X., Zhang, L., Ran, R., & Mol, A. P. J. (2015). Regional restrictions on environmental impact assessment approval in China: The legitimacy of environmental authoritarianism. Journal of Cleaner Production, 92, 100-108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.01.003
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2025 Hasan Shaikh, Lamiya Akter
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
