From waterlogging to land grabbing: the logic of dispossession under neoliberal water management in south-western coastal Bangladesh

This article examines how chronic waterlogging in southwestern coastal Bangladesh has become a mechanism of land dispossession under successive regimes of colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal water governance. Drawing on political ecology and critical agrarian political economy, the study conceptualizes waterlogging not as a purely ecological hazard but as a socio-politically produced condition that facilitates unequal land control and elite accumulation. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in five villages across Abhaynagar and Monirampur upazilas – including focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, case studies, and participant observation – the analysis identifies four interrelated logics of dispossession: neoliberal (state- and market-led), coercive (extra-legal), semi-predatory (contractual and deceptive), and distress-induced dispossession. The findings demonstrate how ecological marginality, institutional fragility, and asymmetric power relations interact to reconfigure land ownership, undermine smallholder livelihoods, and transform agrarian relations in waterlogged landscapes. By tracing continuities from colonial hydraulic interventions to contemporary neoliberal development projects, the article advances sociological understandings of accumulation by dispossession beyond urban and market-centric accounts. It contributes to debates on environmental governance, agrarian change, and climate-related injustice by showing how environmental dysfunction itself becomes a politically productive terrain for dispossession in peripheral rural contexts.