Brothels in Bangladesh – a direct consequence of climate change

As I come to the shift of gear, the dreamy limbo of writing up the museums work we’ve been doing for the past few months and starting to clear a space to think about the work on horizon scanning and futures which hoves into few and will take up most of my thinking and unthinking space from February to July, I’m quite alert to tiny fragments which pack a punch. I’m finding a surprising amount in our mla database which seems to connect directly to the hsf thinking in ways that are almost frightening. For example I wrote recently about poetry as a kind of horizon scanner – the poetry library gets a surprising frontline view of what matters to people.Then in the Guardian this week I was startled by an article on the rise in prostitution in Bangladesh:

“The brothel opened 20 years ago, making it the newest and largest of the 14 recognised brothels in the country. It is set on the meeting point of two vast rivers, the Jamuna and the Ganges (known locally as the Padma), which makes this a very busy place to catch a ferry. Trucks carrying rice, jute, sugar cane and fish from the west and south-west of the country queue here for two or three days at a time to cross the river for the drive to the capital, Dhaka. In Bangladesh on a BBC World Service boat to look at the impact of climate change, I was surprised to find that an unexpected consequence of rising water levels is the growth in demand for prostitution. River erosion has meant the closure of some ferry berths, so men wait even longer to cross the river. And, while they wait, many of them pass the time in the company of Daulatdia’s women.”

We spent some time this week at a workshop imagining scenarios for mla relationship with business (banish mla as concept, replace it with a sense of extended learning places and resources essential to the rounded worker, then ‘backcast’ from that to the present day to see how one would achieve that symbiosis over, say, 20 years).

Anyway, my question for a couple of days has been, take a scenario (not good or bad, hopeful or unhopeful, just a confluence of circumstance) and imagine backwards from that circumstance how would would have forseen it in some way.So I’m interested in the idea of taking brothels (one can deconstruct brothel of course in quite a feminist way – poor endentured women with no prospects, men with too much time on their hands and not much inclination to do cultured things) in Bangladesh (low-lying land, under-resourced in flood management, having to react rather than act, most likely to be one of the frontiers where we witness the consequences of climate change, etc).But working back from brothels, Bangladesh, flooding, too few ferries, downtime. How might one, 10 years ago have forseen this thing? What kinds of horizon scanning might one have done in, say 1997? What kinds of different policies for prostitution and flood transportation might a reasonably accurate prognosis have led to?I think it might be interesting for our hsf governance work to come at it sideways, and find some unlikely events, from history and the present, and consider what a well-scanned intelligence process might have thrown up by way of a different policy path.What’s so interesting here is how little we prize the insights that people can bring from their daily witnessing. I’m witnessing a great deal of unlikely stuff because of where I sit. But I’m not a scanner or a futurist, and there’s no-one whose sleeve I can tug about most of it. I do it because it interests me and puts a bit of pep into my daily work. Think of all those scanners out there. If, instead of simply using people’s excess computing power to calculate space things,we used their witnessing power to help us see further, think of the changes that could bring about.

It happens a bit of course. Say the RSPB and birdwatching. There’s a model of participatory scanning that it’s worth looking more closely at, and I know Natural England so some interesting scanning using Cognitive Edge techniques. And it’s all trendy to talk about the wisdom of crowds. But I’m not talking about exactly any of that here. I think I’m talking about something a bit different that I’m trying to find and describe better.I’m off to read the Guardian and let it settle for a bit while I think about what it is I want to say next.

But before I do, a tiny, gorgeous little thing from my second visit to Louise Bougeois, accompanied by sketches of skyscapers as people – perhaps three of them standing together:

“One man was telling a story, it was a very good story, and it made him happy, but he told it so fast that nobody understood it.”

Yup, that happens a lot.

In Algeria over the past 10 years or so they’ve gone from 2 – 15 newspapers.

All well read too and only lightly censored.

No blogs for days and then two come along at once. Typical of the information highway I say. But this has been on my list to post for a week or two and I’m thinking hard about our new assignment – a Knowledge Enquiry into the knowledge transfer and knowledge economy impact of the cultural assets (experts, collections, spaces) of London (museums, archives, libraries). So what is knowledge transfer? What’s a knowledge economy? What is evidence? How do you find it out? How do you verify?

This is something I found out (but have not checked on) in conversation with the Algerian man who runs a stall in the farmers market. An excellent stall with bourek and Algerian flatbreads and pastries and mint tea, all of which he makes himself. We always chat, about this and that.

How did I find it out? Not by asking about newspapers, but by talking to him about how safe I’d be travelling as a Western woman alone in Algeria.

Now to me, it’s interesting for 2 reasons which we might want to think about in our narrative enquiries and building of evidence bases:

1. an interesting shred of evidence. Only a shred. But he’s an educated man, been here for 17 years, very attached to his home land, observant. In his view, with which I happen to concur, the increase in range of press is an indicator of a society which is opening up to challenge and so more robust. It’s a little nugget to hold on to, a bit of a surprise, something which leaves a knotted handkerchief in the mind as a reminder to build other shreds around it – Algerian shreds, things to do with how the published press, censorship and so on can be indicators of the openness of a society.

2. I found it out in passing while asking about something else. So it was offered to me tangentially by way of evidence that I would be treated with openness not hostility. I wasn’t looking for it. I was looking for something else altogether.

Which leads me to wonder the extent to which we need to ask direct questions or to ask indirect questions which lead us to shreds and snippets we can built into patterns.

Which leads me in turn to wonder about horizon scanning methodologies and inferential research and whether we should boning up on these in any way.