Bangladesh literature review
TODO: create a link to the literature review document here.
Comments from Derek
This literature review is a very useful summary of key themes in the literature on dried fish in Bangladesh. It will be a valuable guide to the literature for the team and for students for research planning. I particularly like how you have indicated focuses, key questions, and gaps, which is valuable in terms of positioning DFM’s eventual research contributions.
From the five focus areas, I take the following points:
1. Value chain studies emphasize the density of value chains, the unequal realization of economic value across the chain, and they are oriented to narrow economic approaches to value. Your emphasis on the last point clearly aligns you with DFM’s social economy focus. In relation to stacked value chain studies, the first point could lead to a question for the BD research to examine: is this density of actors in value chains persisting over time? Or, are value chains for dried fish in Bangladesh simplifying, particularly as large-scale commercial players begin to exert more influence on the dried fish sector? It’s also clear that there is a good foundation of research on dried fish value chains in BD, but as yet it doesn’t seem that anyone has pulled together a picture of the whole dried fish economy of the country. DFM’s first country-level ‘map’ will thus be a very valuable contribution to the literature from the scoping research. That country-level understanding could then be refined and detailed in the team’s second phase of research, whether through and SVC or other methods.
2. Food and nutrition. You show that an important area of concern in the literature is with contaminants and concerns about their consequences for human health (recent articles on micro-plastics in shutki extend this theme), but that broader consumption focused analyses of food and nutrition are lacking. These consumption analyses can have the cultural dimensions that you mention, but also the geographical and socio-economic distributional dimensions that can be derived from quantitative analysis of secondary data of the sort that Sami Farook is planning to undertake for his PhD research.
3. Gender. You note that the literature shows high engagement of women in the dried fish sector and that it suggests strategies for improving women’s opportunities and economic returns. You note, however that the literature does not engage sufficiently with broad prevailing gender ideologies in Bangladesh that may block the ability for women to realize the benefits from the more technical development interventions that the authors propose. This is an astute observation and suggests another important possible contribution from the research of the BD team. To this, I would add that it might be useful to frame this critical observation in terms of intersectionality, as we already know that women’s capacity to realize benefits from development interventions is further shaped other kinds of identity factors including religion and ethnicity. Aklima Akter is planning to work in this area for her Master’s research, so it would be a good idea for the BD team and Aklima to coordinate their research activities and analyses. Aklima, for example, may be able to help expand and refine this section of the BD team’s literature review.
4. Dublachar and labour exploitation. You identify Dublachar as a key geographical site in Bangladesh for dried fish processing, but also as an extreme negative example of labour exploitation patterns in dried fish processing that exist in the country. This is an insightful move on your part to point out Dublachar as a lens on some of the most problematic aspects of dried fish processing in Bangladesh. I was also struck by the links between Dublachar and other geographical spaces and flows in the Bangladesh dried fish sector. Two points here: 1. I think you really need to also bring in Ben and Mostafa’s 2019 chapter[1] as another important reflection on Dublachar. (That chapter also has important material on gender ideology in the Bangladesh dried fish that speaks to your point above about ideology and exploitation of women). 2. Mahfuzar Rahman’s PhD project is looking particularly at labour exploitation and human rights so, as with Aklima and Sami, it will be important to engage in conversation with him about how to make your mutual research projects complementary.
Two further general comments:
1. I really like the direction that you have taken so far with the literature review in the identification of key themes and lessons for future work. I agree, nevertheless, that it makes sense to see this as a work in progress that will continue to be refined over the coming months. I wonder, however, whether we might aim by a certain date to flesh the review out to the point where it might be submitted to a journal? It seems to me that there’s enough promise in the approach you have taken for this to be a formal project output of this sort, in addition to its function of informing project research in Bangladesh. If you think this makes sense, I would suggest getting inputs from the students’ literature reviews, as they have also done/will do considerable work in reviewing the literature. We would need one or a few of you to steer this process if you think aiming for a journal publication makes sense.
2. The one major piece that is currently missing from the review is an effort to chart the representativeness of your review. There are considerably more references than you have mentioned in the Zotero library on Bangladesh. If we want to make the review publishable, we would need to make a grounded argument for how the references you have chosen to focus on are particularly representative of the broader literature and/or make particularly important contributions the key themes that you have identified. In other words, a more complete mapping of the literature is needed to frame the paper if we want to make it publishable.
