Reactive, Individualistic and Disciplinary: The Urban Resilience Project in Dhaka

The World Bank’s Urban Resilience Project (URP) champions resilience as the best response to tackle environmental hazards faced by inhabitants in Dhaka, Bangladesh without sacrificing economic development. Embedded within neoliberal risk management and sustainable development frameworks, the URP supports ongoing forms of urban expansion and densification in Dhaka as the key driver of Bangladesh’s economic growth, purporting that this strategy will enable the city to address increasing and intensifying forms of flooding, heat waves, fires and earthquake risk. This paper argues that the URP depoliticises the causes of and proposed solutions to environmental hazards in Dhaka and the manner in which they are unevenly experienced. Drawing on fieldwork using qualitative methods, this paper posits that three facets guide resilience in Dhaka: reactive neoliberal policies, individualism, and disciplinary control. Ultimately, the URP obfuscates a wider regime of urban development in Dhaka that benefits certain groups (the state, international organisations, elite classes) while further economically and environmentally marginalising those living and working informally. In developing theoretical and empirical contributions to understandings of resilience in global political economy the paper contributes to debates in global political economy and environment, the everyday life of global political economy, and the inter-scalar governance of capitalist societies.