Land-water Management and Sustainability in Bangladesh ― Indigenous Practices in the Chittagong Hill Tracts

Indigenous sustainability and environmental management cannot be understood apart from a community, its traditions, and ways of practices. Interest in Indigenous environmental sustainability has grown steadily in past years, reflecting traditional cultural perspectives about the environment and developing research priorities.

This book explores the ways one Indigenous community, in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, has reinvented the meanings of sustainability using traditional knowledge to blend traditional sentiment with large-scale dislocations within their own communities and international economy. This book includes up-to-date research on meanings and implications of Bangladeshi Indigenous sustainability which focus on relationality, traditional knowledge, spirituality and hybridity. Environmental protection and Indigenous land-water rights have been ignored in the region and there has been minimal research on these intersecting issues locally or internationally. Land-Water Management and Sustainability in Bangladesh addresses this gap in an examination of postcolonial Indigenous communities’ complex and shifting relationships to nature and in relation to discrimination and oppression regarding Indigenous land and rights. The book makes a contribution to both the research literature and on the ground practice in inspiring a new culture of sustainability in Indigenous regions.

Bringing together community engagement, activism, critical research and scholarship to advocate for socio-environmental justice and trans-systematic sustainability of cross-cultural knowledge, the book will be of interest to academics of a variety of disciplines, including environmental policy, conservation practices, Indigenous studies environmental sustainability, anthropology, American studies, Asian Studies and ethnic studies.

Ranjan Datta is a SSHRC Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at University of Regina, Canada. His publications include Responsibilities for Land and Reconciliation and Reconciliation in Practice: A Cross-cultural Perspective (both forthcoming).