Shifting harm without solving it: The socio-political dynamics of industrial relocation failure in Bangladesh’s tannery industry

Why do environmental interventions in the Global South that promise pollution reduction often end up shifting harm rather than solving it? This paper interrogates this paradox through a longitudinal case study of Bangladesh’s high-profile relocation of its leather industry from Hazaribagh to Savar. Framed as a model of sustainable urban reform, the relocation failed to deliver environmental improvement – reproducing pollution in a new location while disrupting long-standing social and production networks. Drawing on 37 interviews with tannery stakeholders, we combine political ecology with path dependence theory to understand how governance failures, elite capture, and institutional inertia undermined reform. We introduce the concept of ‘strategic praise’ to explain how state actors maintained legitimacy through symbolic narratives of success, despite ongoing failures on the ground. We also highlight how relocation entrenched spatial political inequality, cleansing urban Dhaka’s Hazaribagh at the expense of peri-urban Savar. The paper makes three contributions: first, it offers a rare longitudinal account of environmental policy failure in a lower-middle-income country; second, it advances theory by integrating political ecology with path dependence to explain how technocratic reforms falter when severed from their socio-political context (including revealing a new discursive mechanism of ‘strategic praise’ by authorities); and third, it identifies three conditions for more equitable and effective industrial relocation. By situating relocation within the relational and historical dynamics of weak states, the paper contributes to debates on urban environmental justice, symbolic governance, and sustainability transitions in the Global South.