Willem van Deursen

The models were not wrong, exactly. The science was sound. But the models were answering questions that nobody in that room had asked. We had travelled eleven hours to show people a mirror, and the mirror was reflecting something they did not recognise as themselves. It was reflecting us, the experts, not them, the locals.

Later visits took me away from Dhaka, into small villages in the southern deltas. Again, into a world I did not know existed.

Did you ever consider that water management may not always improve livelihoods? For a long time, we thought better water management will indeed make a better country of Bangladesh.