Growing attention to the impacts of climate change around the world has been accompanied by the profusion of discourses about the lives, livelihoods, and geographies that are “viable” and those that are not in the time of climate change. These discourses of viability often invoke concrete physical limits and tipping points suggesting a transcendent natural order. Conversely, I demonstrate how viability is co-produced through political economic structures that exercise power at multiple scales in shaping the environment and understandings of how it is changing. I describe three dialectics of this co-production: epistemic/material (between ideas about viability and their biophysical and political economic conditions), epistemic/normative (between how the world is understood to be and ideas about how we should live in it), and inter-scalar (between geographic scales, where action at one scale shapes both ecologies and understandings of possible action at another). Each of these dialectics shapes the knowledge regimes that govern the ambiguous social and biophysical process of disappearance and foreclosure of livelihood possibilities in the time of climate change. I examine these discourses of viability through narratives of unviable agrarian livelihoods in coastal Bangladesh, as a lens through which to examine the dialectics of viability more broadly. I situate these discourses concretely in relation to an analysis of interdisciplinary social and natural scientific research on ecological and agrarian viability in coastal Bangladesh now and in the future. Across a broad interdisciplinary spectrum, I find that scientific attention to political economy shapes the politics of possibility. Finally, I demonstrate how discourses of viability limit alternative possible economic and ecological futures. I do this through a concrete examination of the co-production of viable agrarian futures within communities in coastal Bangladesh. These alternative visions indicate that the viability of agriculture is shaped by historical and ongoing decisions in the present about cultivation, water management, and development intervention.

伴随着对全球气候变化影响的日益关注，伴随着大量关于“可行”和不处于气候变化时期的生活、生计和地理的讨论。这些关于生存能力的论述经常引用具体的物理限制和临界点，暗示着一种超然的自然秩序。相反，我展示了可行性是如何通过政治经济结构共同产生的，这些结构在多个尺度上行使权力来塑造环境和理解环境如何变化。我描述了这种共同生产的三种辩证法：认知/物质（在关于生存能力的想法及其生物物理和政治经济条件之间），认知/规范（在如何理解世界与我们应该如何生活在其中的想法之间），和跨标量（在地理尺度之间，一个尺度的行动既塑造了生态，又塑造了对另一尺度可能行动的理解）。这些辩证法中的每一种都塑造了知识体系，这些体系支配着在气候变化时期消失和丧失生计可能性的模棱两可的社会和生物物理过程。我通过对孟加拉国沿海地区不可行的农业生计的叙述来审视这些关于生存能力的论述，以此作为更广泛地审视生存能力辩证法的镜头。我将这些论述具体放在对现在和未来孟加拉国沿海生态和农业可行性的跨学科社会和自然科学研究的分析中。在广泛的跨学科范围内，我发现对政治经济学的科学关注塑造了可能性政治。最后，我展示了可行性话语如何限制替代的可能经济和生态未来。我通过具体检查孟加拉国沿海社区内可行的农业未来的共同生产来做到这一点。这些不同的愿景表明，农业的生存能力是由当前关于耕作、水资源管理和发展干预的历史和正在进行的决定所塑造的。