Your Sea Wall Won’t Save You: Negotiating Rhetorics and Imaginaries of Climate Resilience

Abstract

In 2011, a catastrophic flood washed through greater Bangkok. Hydrologically, this was not so unusual; Bangkok occupies the Chao Phraya River Delta, and although the rainfall that year was higher than normal, the waters didn’t reach the hundred-year flood level. But the landscape was more vulnerable than in past cycles. Factory development in the flood plain, subsidence caused by groundwater extraction, and mismanagement of dams upriver led to severe flooding that killed more than 800 people and affected some 13 million lives. Protected by the King’s dike, which encircles the Bangkok Metropolitan Area, the capital city was largely spared, but displaced floodwaters made conditions worse in outlying districts. The sacrifice zones were inundated for weeks, and then months. As angry “flood mobs” descended on the protected areas, opening flood gates and tearing holes in the sandbag walls, the prime minister counseled them to think of the national good. If the city center flooded, she said, it would cause “foreigners to lose confidence in us and wonder why we cannot save our own capital.”