Climate Emergency as Infrastructure of Domination: Green Authoritarianism in Neoliberal Bangladesh

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

This paper explains how ecological crisis is increasingly converted into a durable political resource. Centered on Bangladesh yet analytically generalizable, it theorizes “green authoritarianism” as a mode of rule in which the idioms of climate emergency—articulated through sustainability, resilience, and even climate justice—legitimate technocratic expertise, expand exceptional administrative powers, and normalize coercive forms of governance. Rather than treating climate change as an episodic disruption that compels states to act, the paper shows how climate governance can harden into an infrastructure of domination: it reorganizes state–society relations, displaces democratic accountability, and redistributes environmental and economic risk downward. Drawing on a reflexive, multi-sited ethnographic design, the study traces climate governance across empirically connected arenas in Bangladesh to specify the institutional pathways through which environmental policy becomes a vehicle for democratic erosion. The implications extend beyond Bangladesh: as climate finance and adaptation regimes scale up globally, they may unintentionally entrench authoritarian rule unless accountability and rights-based safeguards are built into climate governance.

Author

• Nikhil Deb, Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo