Silted Struggles: Tensions Between Local Knowledge and Technocratic Governance in the Bengal Delta
Madhurima Majumder, PhD Candidate, Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University
The Bengal Delta is an unruly landscape. Its shifting rivers, sediment flows, and amphibious ecologies resist rigid governance. Yet, state-led water management projects have sought to impose stability on this dynamic terrain. Colonial and postcolonial delta governance have largely followed a technocratic vision that privileges infrastructural fixes over adaptive, community-driven solutions (van Staveren et al., 2017). These interventions have disrupted natural hydrological rhythms while marginalising the knowledge and agency of delta communities whose lives have historically been shaped by the flows of water and silt (Dewan, Mukherji & Buisson 2015; D’Souza 2015).
Tidal River Management (TRM), a water management technique, emerged as a direct refusal to this imposed control. Mobilised through local resistance in the 1980s, TRM works with the delta’s fluid geographies, rather than against them (Kibra, 2011). Through controlled flooding, TRM facilitates sedimentation to raise land levels, reduce waterlogging, and prevent riverbed siltation. This reopens previously submerged areas for farming and fishing, and keeps rivers from choking (Gain et al., 2017; Sakkhar et al., n.d.). TRM was eventually institutionalised within national policy frameworks in the 1990s (Tutu, 2005). However, its bureaucratisation has undermined its radical origins and local agency, weakening its implementation (Nath et al., 2022).
Environmental policies, like TRM, increasingly invoke nature-based and locally led solutions as an attempt to redress legacies of technocratic and exclusionary governance. Framed as critiques of past top-down projects, such initiatives are nevertheless often implemented in ways that reproduce the same patterns of bureaucratic control (Cons, 2025). From within these shifting terrains, I examine how such frameworks intersect with the lived realities and situated knowledge of delta communities. Focusing on Tidal River Management (TRM) in southwest Bangladesh, this piece explores how technocratic governance continues to marginalise situated forms of knowledge and community agency, even as it adopts the language of participation. It primarily draws on fieldnotes from the 2024 River Fair,
TRM as practice: Working with fluid geographies of the Delta
The Lower Bengal Delta is a fluid landscape that defies clear distinctions between land and water. It is often described using terms such as ‘fluid geographies’ and ‘hybrid landscapes’ to capture its inherent instability (Lahiri-Dutt, 2015). Historically, human settlements in this region adapted by moving with the shifting landscape and constructing temporary earthen embankments (Bhattacharyya, 2018). The colonial-era reclamation of mangrove forests for human settlement marked a shift, introducing permanent concrete embankments that drastically altered regional hydrology (D’Souza, 2015). Following independence, Bangladesh's southwest coast underwent further transformation. In the 1960s, USAID and the World Bank supported the construction of Dutch-style polders to control flooding and boost agriculture. Heavily influenced by colonial delta management strategies, these interventions prioritised rigid infrastructural control over traditional adaptive water management practices, disrupting the natural flow of water and sediment (Nath et al., 2022). Within a decade, rivers became choked with silt and left 100,000 hectares in Jessore, Khulna, and Satkhira permanently waterlogged (Dewan, Mukherji & Buisson, 2015). What was once seasonal monsoon flooding became prolonged stagnation, devastating livelihoods.
Pakhimara Beel, a TRM site, now used for agriculture and fishery, Shatkhira, Bangladesh, © Madhurima Majumder, March 2024
Erasure of People’s Knowledge
TRM emerged as local resistance to the failures of the rigid water regimes. Despite lacking formal training, communities recognised the ecological value of tidal flows. In 1979, this resentment sparked an armed resistance in Khulna and Jessore, where residents breached embankments to restore tidal action in waterlogged lowlands (Kibria, 2011; Gain et al., 2017; van Staveren et al., 2017). The movement coalesced under the local leadership of the Paani Committee, supported by grassroots NGOs like Uttaran (Haque, 2015). By 1997, the first structured TRM was implemented in Beel Bhaina, a low-lying floodplain depression (beel) in the Khulna–Jessore region. The results were striking: riverbeds deepened, sediment revitalised farmlands and ecological function was restored in previously waterlogged areas (Tutu, 2005).
TRM’s successes influenced the national government and international institutions like the Asian Development Bank to adopt TRM principles (Tutu, 2005). Today, although TRM is officially recognised within Bangladesh’s Delta Plan 2100, its implementation remains stagnant due to bureaucratic inertia, political hesitation, and unresolved conflicts over compensation and control.
Over time, the fact that TRM was designed, refined and implemented after years of community struggle was erased from official accounts (Nath et al., 2022). It is increasingly framed as an intervention informed by technical experts, erasing its roots in people’s struggle and reducing communities from knowledge-producers to passive recipients of external expertise (Sakkhar et al., n.d.). Such erasures are not unique to TRM but reflect broader patterns in environmental governance, where non-Western epistemologies are absorbed only after being stripped of their political and social contexts (McGregor, 2021; Gatt, 2023).
The River Fair: Paternalism of Scientific Authority and Bureaucratic Control
Audience and speakers at the River Fair 2024, Khulna, Bangladesh, © Madhurima Majumder, 20th April 2024
The River Fair 2024 brought together different TRM stakeholders to evaluate the past and envision a more sustainable delta governance. Based on fieldnotes, I interpret this event as a site of epistemic tensions where lived experience, expert knowledge, and governance priorities collide.
Technical experts presented maps and models showcasing TRM’s effectiveness. Bureaucrats followed with discussions of logistical hurdles and funding constraints. Some framed TRM as a necessary compromise; others acknowledged its social costs, such as displacement, delays, and unkept promises. The audience mainly consisted of local residents, activists, and journalists.
As the presentations went on, frustration grew among the audience. Sitting there, I felt the tension rise toward refusal. A local farmer finally broke the general hum and said: “You think of us as illiterate and talk to us as if we need explaining what TRM is. We know this land by the feel of silt beneath our feet. Your maps can't tell us more than that. We are the real experts.”Others echoed this demand for accountability and a plan that would not repeat past mistakes. They needed no explanation as they had designed and fought for TRM and lived through its failures. “They ask for our opinions, but none are incorporated. That is not participation,” said a man whose land had been taken without compensation for water management purposes.
For a moment, the scripted nature of the conference faltered. The polished language of expertise collided with the raw urgency of those who stood to lose or gain everything. The organisers intervened, asking for calm, but the atmosphere had shifted. Later speakers were compelled to respond to critiques that now hung heavily in the room.
These moments of disruption did not arise in a vacuum. They drew on years of frustration. What began as a practice rooted in collective resistance became a site of recurring dispossession. In Beel Khukshia, compensation distribution was mismanaged, leaving many farmers without payments. In Pakhimara Beel, a lack of early public participation led to legal challenges that stalled the project. And in Beel Kedaria, local elites and influential shrimp farmers allegedly captured the TRM process and diverted benefits disproportionately in their favour (Mahmuda et al., 2019). A former Paani Committee member recounted how names were unfairly struck off the compensation list because they had no political connections. Early TRM projects succeeded in part because they were locally led. Later, conflict during TRM implementation often stemmed from mismatched expectations between local residents and technocratic actors like government-related or multilateral agencies (Nath et al., 2022). Disputes also emerged within the communities, shaped by differing interests and stakes. Although consultation with local communities was incorporated once TRM was formally adopted, their involvement remained token at best.
Knowledge, Power, and the Bureaucratisation of TRM
At the River Fair, a public statement was signed by over 25 stakeholders, including engineers, scientists, parliamentarians, and activists, calling for the implementation of TRM for routine dredging. While community voices were acknowledged, the framing remained largely top-down, emphasising consultation rather than co-production or shared authority. Whether these advocacy efforts will translate into meaningful implementation remains uncertain.
The River Fair highlighted that while TRM has become part of the dominant environmental discourse, its success depends on centring local knowledge and agency, and the desire to work with nature rather than control it. Years of stalled projects, elite capture, and failed compensation have shown the cost of ignoring those roots (Sakkhar et al., n.d.). Although there is an increasing push towards nature-based solutions and locally led adaptation, as evidenced by international and national policy endorsements, these initiatives remain embedded within historic and ongoing power structures. Adaptation strategies are still driven by Western scientific expertise and state institutions that marginalise other knowledges (Agrawal, 2014). Even well-intentioned interventions risk reproducing top-down colonial logics of control and extraction embedded in state-driven environmental projects (Dewan, Mukherji & Buisson, 2015). While Bangladesh may assert political sovereignty, global funding structures and entrenched knowledge hierarchies continue to shape environmental governance, often reinforcing historical exclusions of local actors.
Yet, the River Fair revealed that the prevalent top-down model is neither absolute nor uncontested. In marginal, unruly environments marked by uncertainty, grounded collective strategies emerge from below and challenge technocratic logics (Ghosh et al., 2025). When local voices disrupted the event, they exposed the limits of technocratic governance and the bureaucratic control that maintains it. These disruptions remind us that delta governance is not only a site of exclusion but also one where knowledge can be reconfigured through grounded expertise and resistance.
Footnotes:
[1] A public event designed as both a cultural gathering and policy forum, see below for more information organised in Khulna by Uttaran and the Paani Committee, along with reflections from fieldwork conducted in regions where the TRM movement first emerged.
[2] All quotes are translated from Bangla.