Making a livelihood in the Sundarbans mangroves in the Gulf of Bengal has become increasingly challenging due to extreme poverty, frequent cyclones, tiger attacks, smuggling and organized crime by pirates, as well as historical marginalization rooted in colonial exploitation and exclusionary forest governance. In recent years, Bengal Tiger protection and climate-focused development interventions have emerged as a dominant strategy for mangrove governance, which many argue requires a careful re-assessment of their effectiveness and impacts. Grounded in qualitative methodology, with a conceptual focus on political ecology, this exploratory case study draws on six months of community-level fieldwork and aims to critically analyze the de facto challenges to resource access, rural social-political dynamics and everyday livelihood concerns and vulnerability of mangrove communities in the region.
This study finds that moneylending has become an instrumental strategy for managing increased government fees and revenues, as well as extra-legal expenses associated with harvesting trips. Moreover, moneylending not only shapes livelihood choices and options but also crucial for dwellers to survive seasonal hardship through non-harvesting periods and adapt to emergencies. For marginalized mangrove resource dwellers who depend on harvesting cycles, existing formal moneylending services offer ill-fitting timelines and inaccessible barriers such as high collateral deposits and legal documentation requirements. As an alternative, moneylenders have become important actors controlling rural cash supply and informal power in mangrove resource governance. The study outlines a debt trap related to the resulting high dependency on informal cash access, elite capture and local price control for forest resources, paired with systematic injustices and accountability gaps. In its conclusion, the paper raises the question of how effectively addressing local dwellers’ moneylending concerns may act as an indirect, or secondary tool in mitigating the growing overall livelihood vulnerability burden and conservation challenges in the region.
Key Words: brokers and middlemen, forest bureaucracy, maladaptation, micro-credit, co-optation, development
