L6 - climate migration, mobility and movement Flashcards
McAdam and Felli - comparisons
Agreement: language used for climate-related movement (CRM) not fixed or apolitical
- how language and concepts used to describe CRM are not given or apolitical
Applying different linguistic categories and concepts will
- Highlight different aspects of CRM
- Give different meanings to CRM
- Embed CRM with different normative values
- Suggest different political responses to CRM
Agreement: climate-related movement isn’t monocausal (singular causal terms) but highly complex
- It must be understood in connection with other causal factors, especially economic ones (e.g., poverty, labor, opportunity)
- it is not driven solely by climate change -> to understand CRM you also have to analyze other factors
Agreement: how we conceptualize CRM affects who we think is responsible for responding to climate change
Disagreement: McAdam worries about robbing those affected by CRM of agency whereas Felli worries about making those affected by CRM responsible for managing climate change impacts on their own
diff linguistic paradigms have big impact
for both CRM is really complex (diff to track bc it overlaps with other pushes and pulls)
last agreement: how we frame influences who we deem as responsible
difference: competing considerations = should we worry about robbing them of agency or about them being subject to being blamed (/shifts responsibility) for things they didn’t cause?
McAdam’s deflationary analysis
- two overarching claims about CRM
she argues there are
Major limits to what we can know about climate-related movement
= limits to knowledge
- how much migration can be attributed to climate change
Major limits to applicability of existing refugee law to climate-related movement
= limits to refugee law
- legal definition refugee requires discriminatory persecution = not obviously at play with climate change
McAdam’s deflationary analysis - limits to knowledge
difficult to disentangle climatic drivers of migration from other drivers
- climate change is “threat multiplier” that exacerbates other factors that lead people to move
- climate-related movement’s difficult to analyze bc causality behind it is complex
- climate change intersects with other factors (e.g. unemployment, overcrowding)
- only in combination of factors people are likely to move
- makes it difficult to understand because it is so complex and multifaceted
difficult to accurately quantify climate-related movement
- CRM often bureaucratically uncounted (e.g. not a visa option)(if they succeed to migrate, often apply for visa diff types of options)
- hard to distinguish between long and short term movement, diff causes etc.
- CRM often domestic, therefore invisible and uncounted
- if climate change is a threat multiplier, it is hard to correctly track CRM
- McAdams favors a “minimalist or skeptical” vs “maximalist or alarmist” approach
*maximalist emphasizes large numbers (can have good intentions, e.g. to draw attention to importance) - maximalist approaches may mean to helpfully draw attention to CRM but can backfire when inaccurate (e.g. UN 2005 prediction of 50 million climate refugees by 2010) -> people can become skeptical (UN criticized for this + sceptics used this as “evidence” UN couldn’t be trusted or that climate change wasn’t real”
climate-related movement must be analyzed contextually
- climate factors interact with other, pre-existing patterns of movement and so must be understood in context
- e.g. pacific island countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu have long been interested in migration as a way to address non-climatic challenges (e.g. overcrowding, economic opportunity)
- this interest is repackaged in light of climate change with climate framed as the only issue, but this has had negative fallout (e.g. withdrawal of foreign aid, sense migration is only option): climate-focused narrative has brought problems = can become self-fulfiling prophecy (if it makes islands lost cause, sources of foreign aid may dry up + locals may feel they have no choice but to leave)
= doomsday predictions risk becoming realities
omissions in climate-related movement literature
- worst off might be unable to move (e.g. bc illness, less of money, lack of connections), going un-studied and un-helped bc they are stationary = large humanitarian problem missed by existing discussion
- focus is on populations without access to robust migration pathways, but migration can still pose challenges even for those with more secure access (e.g. disruptions to culture, identity, human rights, security)
McAdam’s limits to refugee law
(concerns about applying climate refugees as legal category)
In 1951 Refugee Convention and later protocols, refugee is someone who =
“owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it”
difficult to apply to those moving in connection with climate change
(people displaced by climate change hard to place in this refugee definition)
- applicable only to those who’ve crossed an international border
- but CRM often domestic
- !!! applicable only to those who’ve been persecuted (i.e. discriminated against bc of a personal attribute)
- but with CRM it may be unclear who the persecutor is (e.g. western countries failing to cut emissions, int’l community) + that discrimination is at play
(impacts climate change seem to be indiscriminate, not targeted)
=> conclusion: someone fleeing from climate change isn’t obviously a refugee (doesn’t meet thresholds)
a battle of words
climate “refugee”
- indicative of passivity and helplessness?
- implies movers are victims who can’t help themselves?
- McAdam critizices linguistic implications of the climate refugee term (normatively dubious term)
- climate refugee paradigm rejected on the islands (Kiribati and Tuvalu) bc it created sense of helplessness among leavers
- can rob movers of agency
climate “migrant”
- indicative of unfair burden shifting?
- implies impacted officials - not emitting countries - are responsible for navigating climate change themselves?
- Felli criticizes discourse shift to speaking about climate migrants: thinks migrant language ends up unfairly shifting responsibility for dealing with climate change (shifts burden away from high emitting countries, shifting burden to countries with lot of people migrating, forcing them to adapt)
from climate refugees to climate migrants
Climate refugee paradigm
- Highlighted impact of climate change on people (human consequences)
- Framed movers as victims of a phenomenon they didn’t create
- Drew attention to failure of climate mitigation and adaptation policies
- Emphasized importance of protecting human rights of and providing humanitarian aid for movers
- meant to support climate change mitigation and aid
Replaced around mid-2000s by climate migrant paradigm as
- climate negotiations stalled
- aims downshifted from mitigation to adaptation
(IGOs, govs etc. talk about migrants, not refugees)
Climate migrant paradigm
- Presents CRM not as evidence of failure to redress climate change but as a productive strategy for adapting to it
Felli: from victims to entrepreneurs
Climate refugee paradigm positions movers as victims of an injustice who are owed a debt
Underscores that climate movers are asked to bear the cost of a phenomenon they didn’t create and therefore implies that they should be made whole for this cost or repaid a debt (i.e., deserve reparative justice)
Climate migrant paradigm positions movers as entrepreneurs who’re individually responsible for themselves
Frames adaptation not as collective, socio-political change that responds to altered external conditions but as the transformation of individuals into flexible go-getters who can respond to climate change themselves
- movers no longer owed a debt, no reparative justice
- movers are repositioned as entrepreneurs who can take responsibility for themselves: refers to transformation of individuals that need to become more flexible and adaptable to climate change
- this way it asks individuals to become flexible entrepreneurs, e.g. by moving, rather than that structural change was necessary
- changes meaning of climate change mitigation: now an individual project that people affected by it need to undertake (before it was emitting countries having to mitigate, to go more green)
Felli: from justice to economic development
Climate refugee paradigm suggests states have an obligation to protect movers
Locates climate movers in international law as bearers of formal rights guarantees
Climate migrant paradigm suggests states must manage how migrants take responsibility for themselves
- once they are migrants, movers are not conceptually located in formal rights protections, IL, climate migrant is subject to deformalized norms and various gov management techniques
- no longer rights-bearers to be legally protected, but targets of informal management techniques
Locates climate movers in deformalized governance norms and practices (e.g., soft laws, capacity building techniques)
Shift from legal protection and justice to informal management and economic development
Felli: from rights bearers to laborers
Goal of migrant management is to sustain global capital accumulation
- maintaining society of mass consumption in the north involves displacing the burden on the global south, most evident in spatial and temporal displacement of CO2
Sustaining mass consumption in the North entails displacing environmental burdens onto the South and then managing these populations to be economically productive members of the global labor force
- climate change creates outsized material insecurities in the south, that are then managed to the benefit of capital
Climate change creates outsized material insecurity in the South that is then managed to capital’s benefit
Peripheral populations managed largely by
- international organizations via
- top-down, politically unresponsive governance mechanisms (e.g., expertise, best practices, evaluations)
Integrating peripheral populations into the global economy in this way is a form of “primitive accumulation” (i.e., an ongoing process of making people into laborers by keeping them separate from means of production so that to survive they must work for a wage)
- dispossession makes survival dependent on selling labour power for exchange of wage
- ensures that dispossessed peoples strive to survive benefits capital
Migration management generally, and climate migration management in particular, are forms of “primitive accumulation”
- those made insecure by climate change are changed into productive notes of int’l labour
In context of climate migration, those made insecure by impact of climate change are turned into productive wage laborers
Felli: disempowered migrants
international labor migration management
- Isn’t benign or neutral
- Doesn’t safeguard freedom of self-determination
- Is organized to facilitate capital accumulation
migration managed to align with employers’ interests more than workers’ interests
migrant labor is made vulnerable and insecure
- Temporary and circular migration schemes
- Deprivation of basic rights (e.g., rights of citizenship, freedom of association, right to organize)
- Linkage of migrant permits to specific businesses makes quitting for alternate employment or better treatment hard
- Mistreatment by recruitment agencies
- Poor working conditions
- Reduced access to social safety net provisions
also works to discipline domestic labour: pitting them against each other in competition, making both subordinate to power of capitalists
-> climate migration paradigm doesn’t give migrations as much autonomy as it seems to do
Turner & Bailey: ecobordering
Frames:
- immigration as a threat to local or national environment
- borders as a form of env protection
= talks about climate migration nexus that blames migration from the global south as cause of env degradation
Shifts blame for environmental degradation away from economic structure and onto a group of people, specifically racialized migrants from the Global South
Confuses an effect of env harm for the cause of env harm
- how we talk about CRM has political implications + env implications (bc misrepresenting it as a cause rather than effect -> actual cause goes unaddressed/overlooked)
Appears to absolve Global North nationals of responsibility for environmental degradation
Allows capitalistic production and exchange to continue causing environmental harm
- allows nationals to overlook how capitalist system of production and consumption are the real engines of env crises
- the real cause is depoliticized
= it is unjust + it allows nationals in the north to overlook how capitalism is the real driver of env crisis AND the ways nationals in the north themselves contribute to the problem (blaming one group absolves others)
ecobordering discourse and the far-right
Turner & Bailey analyze how European far-right parties use racialized eco-bordering discourse
two important points:
- For some, particularly Western European far-right parties this
- marks a shift away from outright denial of climate change and environmental degradation toward
*first they rejected reality of climate change, but some beginning to accept that it exists - an acknowledgement of these issues and effort to draw implications from them that advance a far-right perspective
- Ecobordering discourse isn’t limited to the far-right but can also resonate with conservative and liberal environmental views
- they don’t really elaborate, but with malthusianism we can see how this works
ecobordering and malthusianism
Ecobordering presents/frames environmental degradation as a function of too many people consuming too few resources or as a mismatch between (growing) population and (decreasing/shrinking) sustenance base
Seen this way, environmental repair involves decreasing population to match resource capacity (to not outpace env capacity)
Idea that population can outpace material resource is associated with C18 political economist and theologian Thomas Malthus and his “Essay on the Principle of Population” according to which human population grows faster than the food supplies needed to support it
- observed discrepancy in rate at which population can expand and resources expand
malthusiansm expanded
Human population increases at a geometric rate (e.g., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16)
- naturally doubles itself
Materials needed to keep population alive, namely food, can only be increased at an arithmetic rate (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
- can’t be grown/reproduced at same pace
- arithmetically rather than geometric -> growing discrepancy
When population growth outpaces resource growth, some will suffer and die, bringing population to resource ratio temporarily back into balance before population eventually outgrows resources again
This cyclical imbalance can be managed to some degree if people, specifically the poor, actively reduce their rates of reproduction
Poor can be encouraged to learn this lesson by
- cutting social welfare
- offering religious instruction that if people have more children than they can support, then they’re responsible for their own suffering (starvation)
= visible how structural resource management problem is reframed as population problem for which a particular group of people is to blame (for Malthus the poor put unsustainable strain on env resources)
neo-malthusian environmentalisms
Presents/frames environmental degradation as a mismatch between population and resources
Prescribe population management and reduction as cures/necessary for environmental repair
More conservative forms: emphasize tragedy of this mismatch (i.e., where there are too many people relative to too few resources, difficult choices must be made about who gets those resources)
More liberal forms: emphasize power of reproductive choice (i.e., individuals who care about the environment can choose to have fewer or no children to help repair the planet)
For Turner & Bailey, Neo-Malthusian environmentalisms can support the logic of ecobordering because the claim that environmental degradation is a problem of too many people consuming too few resources is easily narrowed to blame specific groups of people (e.g., migrants)
- so not only far-right, also liberal and conservative can uses ecobordering framework
- not just too many people (population in general), but specifically too many migrants (or migrants having too many kids)
- it is migrants from the global south that needs to be/consume less
ecobordering and two other legacies
Per Turner & Bailey, ecobordering discourse also (next to malthusianism) engages and adapts the racialized legacies of colonialism and nationalism
Both historically made claims about who could and couldn’t be trusted to care for and manage the environment
Both historically linked such claims to capitalistic assumptions about what good environmental management involved (i.e., transformation of nature into private property holdings that can be made productive and profitable)
nationalistic and colonial tropes of env stewardship (mixed with Malthusian tropes)
nationalism
- the good Environmental steward/protector belongs to and is invested in the land (i.e., is a national)
*only people with roots in a place can be relied on to take proper/well care of it - Good resource management requires longstanding stake in and connection to environment
- Reflected in ethnonationalist concept of “blood and soil” according to which nationals are so connected to and one with the land that their blood is intermixed with its soil
- bad steward lacks connection to land = immigrant
colonialism
- Environmental steward tames and cultivates nature (only those who dominate the env, make it useful for capitalist accumulation are good managers/caretakers of the natural world)
- Good resource management makes environment useful for capitalistic production and exchange
- Historically this logic was used to legitimate colonial intervention (i.e., local populations who don’t interact with their environments in ways that facilitate capitalism are viewed as materially wasteful and as appropriate targets of colonial intervention)
ecobordering discourse today
- European far right parties ecobordering discourse 1
= “migration as environmental plunder” narrative
= malthusian and nationalistic
Turner & Bailey: “In this imaginary, Global South migration is depleting scarce natural resources and exacerbating environmental degradation within Europe”
Malthusian callback: immigration leads to overpopulation and a mismatch between how many people there are relative to what the environment can support
Nationalism callback: amid such resource scarcity, European nationals with longer and closer connections to the environment are the most deserving beneficiaries of limited resources
- they have been there the longest, have closest relation with it -> nationals are most deserving of the scarce resources
E.g., Swiss People’s Party (SVP): argues that recent immigration to Switzerland has added 543,000 cars and 789 buses to Swiss roads; increased country’s power consumption by 2 billion kilowatt hours; and boosted water consumption to 59 billion liters; concludes overpopulation is the “greatest environmental killer” and that immigration must be limited to “curb overpopulation” (help repair the env)
ecobordering discourse today
- European far right parties’ ecobordering discourse 2
“migrant as environmental vandal”
= nationalist and colonial underpinning
- denigrates env capacity of migrants, they are seen as inherently incapable to manage/protect resources
Turner & Bailey: “Racialized Global South migrants are cast as ‘uncivilized’ threats to the local environment due to their character. They are depicted as inherently incapable or unwilling to manage natural resources or protect the natural world”
Colonialism callback: non-European migrants allegedly either too lazy, ignorant, or both to be good stewards of the environment
Nationalism callback: European nationals can be expected to care for their national environs because they have longstanding ties to them
E.g., Marine Le Pen: Environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it’s the natural child of rootedness…if you’re a nomad, you’re not an environmentalist…Those who are nomadic do not care about the environment; they have no homeland”
- environmentalists can only be people who have roots, because nation and nature is one thing, to care for the natural env is to care about the nature
- echoes language of Volkism (env authoritarianism)
- nomads don’t care for the env -> likely to mistreat it
questions
maximalist views/estimates CRM (big nr of people being forced to move): might make people take it seriously and do something about it -> push to engage with it, to do something about it
- for McAdam: it can create discrepancy between predictions and facts (bc it is diff to quantify) -> negative unintended consequence
- discourses around climate migration play into the hands of far-right political perspectives, may be another reason to be wary around maximalist orientation
McAdam not opposed to numbers, just wants to emphasize it is hard to get them - need to factor in a lot of things = modesty in minimal approach that avoids overstatements and acknowledges limits to our ability to know
how big is ecobordering in far-right European parties?
often they deny climate change, Turner and Bailey are sensitive to this: they say it remains a feature of many far-right discourse, but also observe turn to ecobordering = marks notable shift in some corners of far right European parties (so it is a relatively narrow trend, esp in Western Europe, limited to specific far-right parties)
- it is starting to happen (not all parties have it yet, not all recognize climate change and are fans of ecobordering
- particularly for young voters it is a growing agenda item + more effects of climate change -> may be strategic for far right to address it
do far-right parties talk about the same thing with ecobordering?
- focus on non-climatic env considerations tend to better compliment a nationalistic focus (bc climate change almost per definition pushes against nations as correct unit to do politics: climate change doesn’t respect borders)
- focus on env degradation more generally (pollution, desertificatoin, deforestation) can reinscribe importance of national borders + allow for equation nation and nature
- so you’ll often see focus on env degradation things that reinforce nation-state boundaries rather than climate change
