UC Berkeley

There are currently more displaced people worldwide than ever before, with over 100 million displaced people globally. Rates of displacement continue to rise due to the pace, scale, and persistence of ethnic conflicts and environmental disaster due to climate change. These displacements increasingly become protracted ones, as in refugee camps that last for decades, with countries of the Global South bearing the brunt of “hosting” the displaced. This dissertation puts forth the case of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, currently in the largest and most climate-vulnerable refugee camp in the world, to investigate what happens when the twin crises of climate change and refugee influx converge, and when “sustainability” is promoted as a desirable humanitarian response goal in refugee camps.

This project traces the evolution of humanitarian relief projects in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, from the start of the Rohingya refugee crisis in 2017 to the present, through four years of ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with United Nations officials and humanitarian and development workers in the Rohingya refugee camps, climate scientists, Rohingya activists, and Bangladeshi policymakers and researchers, as well as archival analysis of United Nations historical records, and participant observation in international conferences and research workshops. Drawing on theoretical debates from the fields of humanitarianism, critical development, refugee and migration studies, political ecology, and climate adaptation, I argue that the international humanitarian response in the Rohingya refugee camps is increasingly defined by and through a “sustainable displacement” regime, in which focus on reducing settlements’ environmental impact can surpass bearing witness to the injustice inherent in their existence. My findings show how emerging climate adaptation technologies and practices in the Rohingya refugee camps, the first refugee setting with climate resilience goals, have sweeping implications for the human rights of people in protracted displacement situations globally. In doing so, this research acts as a critical intervention that highlights the stakes for planning for climate change in humanitarian settings while complicating the evaluative binary of success/failure in conditions of protracted displacement.