Fuad Ali

This dissertation looks at adaptation to the river erosion hazard in Bangladesh through its most exacting river, the braided Jamuna. The Jamuna River has destroyed and continues to threaten significant areas of settlements, farmed land and infrastructure. Local communities experience a social disintegration and pauperisation which lasts for generations. Although advanced for several decades, the public engineering effort to mitigate the erosion is piecemeal and has had limited success to date.

The research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the hazard, in both content and method. Using Remote Sensing data to distinguish regions of dormant, explosive, minimal and constant erosion, the physical morphology of the river is linked to the community adaptation through the creation of maps depicting historical institutional displacement. This spatial information is linked to the qualitative investigation focusing on the expression of values in adaptation by examining social structures and investigating technological development. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas of fields, capital and habitus, interview data is gathered from: displacees; local elites; the engineering-science community; and the political-administrative structure. The analysis is conducted along four themes; the spatial history of community displacement; social values; institutional operation; and learning in practice.

Findings show the marked persistence of displaced local institutions. Dormant erosion zones host the most displaced institutions, acting as refuges once the risk is lowered through engineering or serendipity. The non-material values deeply impacted by the hazard underpin the strong local aspiration for engineering intervention. However, political discontinuity, associated institutional instability and spatial biasing of construction hinders the success of erosion mitigation and the development of appropriate national technological expertise.

The small national economic resource base, shortsighted negotiations with international lenders and reduced public confidence in water sector engineering are also confounding factors. Evidence suggests that social and technological progress occurs when values, institutional results and political commitment align.

I was born in London in 1980 and obtained a Physics degree from Imperial College London. I next completed the Masters in Optics and Photonics at the same department focussing my dissertation on solar concentrations designs for urban, rural, Northern and Southern contexts. Reflecting on travels and experiences with science and its direction, I decided to explore river erosion, which is a particularly tough physical and social problem in Bangladesh. I was awarded an ESRC/NERC Interdisciplinary Research Studentship to study in the Geography department of King’s College London in 2004. I am presently awaiting my viva.

Hazards; Political Ecology; Ex-Colonial Development; Sociology of Scientific Knowledge; Science, Technology and Society; Participatory GIS; Islamic Development; Institutional Analysis; South and South-East Asian History and Politics.

Ali, F. M. M. (2006) Maqasid Based Development – Towards an easily accessible framework for the Ummah’s advancement. Conference on ‘Maqasid–al-Shar’iyah and its Realisation in Contemporary Societies’, International Islamic University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 6-10th August 2006.

Ali, F. M. M. (2003) Ray-tracing analysis of novel solar concentrator designs for urban and rural applications. Masters Thesis. Department of Physics, Imperial College London.