Entanglements of Sustainability in Dhaka

The Complications of Deploying Technological Solutions to Capitalist Problems

Abstract

This article focuses on the ways that technological initiatives aimed at contributing to the sustainability of human lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh, are coupled to social, economic and environmental issues that at best have no easy solution, and at worst leads initiatives to worsen one issue as they try to solve another. With a starting point in ethnographic observations made during a research visit in July 2023, we present how such initiatives and their underlying visions of technological transformations operate in relation to the contemporary vagaries of an international capitalism, which itself is sustained by a faith in technological solutions. Our observations lead us to pay attention to how both the vulnerabilities to the hazards exacerbated by climate change, and the alleged technological solutions to mitigate these hazards, are tied up in social inequalities related to income, class and consumption, but also how they are coupled or decoupled from populations in the Global North, whose purchases sustain local economies in Bangladesh. Namely, discussions of the way that new technological transformations impact upon the environment, or the climate, or sustainability more generally, often take a starting point in the processes of digitalisation taking place in the Global North, where the solutions to climate change are often assumed by mainstream political and industrial actors to be technological and often digital. This article thus aims – through the deployment of ethnographic sensitivity – to shift the digitally focused gaze to a reiteration of the bigger question of how capitalism is multifariously involved in climate change and sustainability more broadly through technological means.