Elsevier

Environmental Science & Policy

Volume 126, December 2021, Pages 11-21
Environmental Science & Policy

Situating ‘migration as adaptation’ discourse and appraising its relevance to Senegal’s development sector

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2021.09.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We investigated uptake and use of migration as adaptation discourses in Senegal.

  • Interest in migration as climate adaptation strategy is growing but superficial.

  • Sedentary bias in Senegalese development sector: migration seen as failure to adapt.

  • Dominant discourse opposes new migrations but turns to diaspora for adaptation goals.

  • Minority discourse emphasises freedom of movement, but not climate justice.

Abstract

Academic and policy domains are increasingly constructing ‘migration as adaptation’ as a policy ideal against alarmist, security-oriented approaches to the climate-migration nexus. However, our knowledge of how development actors in national contexts view and use migration as adaptation in practice remains limited. Based on 90 interviews with development stakeholders, this paper demonstrates the limited reach of the migration as adaptation policy ideal in Senegal’s development sector. It is considered too vague a concept to operationalise and is in tension with the wider discursive context on migration and development, marked by sedentary bias which requires ‘addressing the root causes of migration’, including environmental change, to ‘fix populations in place’. A dominant discourse accommodates sedentary bias. It allows for a narrow application of migration as adaptation through ‘return migration’ and ‘diaspora mobilisation’ projects. These target only existing migrants, avoiding new mobility solutions. A minority counter-discourse rejects sedentary bias, emphasising freedom of movement.

Introduction

Accelerated climate change is widely predicted to have a major impact on world-wide migration trends in the coming decades (Rigaud et al., 2018, World Meteorological Organization, 2021). Some argue this is already the case, pointing to populations displaced by climate-induced disasters around the world (IDMC 2021; Myers, 2002). Predictions of this kind have prompted alarming warnings of an incoming “flood” or “rising tide” of climate refugees, triggering fears of a “massive exodus” towards the West (van der Land and Hummel, 2013). As a result, debates on the link between environmental changes, including climate change, and migration, tend to frame the potential of environmental migration in negative terms. They typically portray potential environmental or climate migrants either as passive victims in need of humanitarian assistance, thereby furthering problematic ‘white saviour’ tropes, or as threats to European, giving new justifications to exclusionary migration and border agendas in Europe and elsewhere (Bettini, 2014, Boas et al., 2019, Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2010, Hartmann, 2010, Ransan-Cooper et al., 2015). Although these negative framings emerged in the 1990s (see Black, 2001; Castles, 2002; Saunders, 2000), they remain very common, in the press (Russo and Wodak, 2019, Sakellari, 2019) and high-profile think tank and NGO reports (e.g., EJF, 2017; IEP, 2020; Richards and Bradshaw, 2017).

Over the past 15 years, ‘migration as adaptation’ has emerged as a positive alternative framing. In this view, migration is an opportunity, a proactive strategy individuals, households and communities can use to reduce their vulnerabilities to environmental change, including climate change. Migration as adaptation holds a prominent place in current climate-migration debates, appearing to some academic and policy stakeholders as a “policy ideal” to aspire to (Gemenne and Blocher, 2017; Ober and Sakdapolrak, 2017). However, many academic researchers are unconvinced by attempts to reframe migration as an adaptive strategy. The ‘policy ideal’ has been much critiqued and attempts to translate migration as adaptation into development practice – most prominently in the UK Government’s Foresight Report (2011) – have met resistance (reviewed in Section 2).

By and large, however, few studies investigate how development policymakers and practitioners working at the national level make sense of migration as adaptation. Most studies of migration as adaptation tend to focus on perspectives from international organisations (Ober, 2014 Hall, 2015), or international climate negotiations (Bettini, 2014, Bettini et al., 2017, Methmann and Oels, 2015, Ober and Sakdapolrak, 2017, Ransan-Cooper et al., 2015, Rothe, 2017). Studies focused on national-level development policy contexts are rarer and tend to focus primarily on low-lying islands and coastal areas in the Pacific (e.g., Farbotko and Lazrus, 2012; Gharbaoui and Blocher, 2016; Remling, 2020), as well as in the Indian Ocean (Arnall and Kothari, 2015), Bangladesh (Geun Ji, 2019) and Thailand (Ober and Sakdapolrak, 2019).

We argue that more critical studies of how the migration as adaptation policy ideal translates to national contexts would be useful. They offer opportunities to assess the impact of the policy ideal – primarily generated and propagated in Western academic and policy discourses – in national development contexts. Has it influenced the discourses and practices of development actors tasked with designing and implementing projects ‘on the ground’? Does it promote increased intersection of adaptation programmes and migration policies? How does it relate to and interact with wider pre-existing development discourses and politics in specific development contexts? These questions matter because any changes incited by migration as adaptation approaches could have significant consequences on the livelihoods of target populations. In this paper, we use a case study based on 90 qualitative interviews with stakeholders in the Senegalese development sector to explore these questions. Our analysis is rooted in a poststructuralist understanding of discourse and informed by political ecology’s attention to power dynamics.

Section snippets

A challenge to negative framings of environmental migration

One shared aspect of the victimisation and securitisation policy framings is that they both describe migration as a failure to adapt to changing environmental conditions. These framings therefore tend to favour policies that encourage people to stay in their locations of residence (Geiger and Pécoud, 2013). Some academic and policy stakeholders counter these negative framings of environmental migration with a more positive approach: ‘migration as adaptation’. This framing presents migration as

Case study: the Senegalese development sector

We chose Senegal as a case study for this paper for several reasons. First, Senegal has in recent years been identified as a possible point of departure, among others, for current and future “climate migrants”, headed for Europe. Inland villages are depicted as disaster areas, struck by climate-induced drought (Collectif Argos, 2010, Foote, 2016, Friedman, 2016). On the coast, the city of Saint-Louis, heavily impacted by coastal erosion and tidal waves, has also attracted media and policy

Methodological framework and empirical materials

The paper takes an exploratory, actor-oriented and poststructuralist approach to the study of discourse (cf. Adger et al., 2001; Taylor, 2015). Poststructuralist discourse theory has received little attention within environmental migration research (Remling, 2020). We define discourse as a socially shared perspective on a topic, including all social practices and relations. Discourses delineate what is acceptable and what is not. They guide the actions of various stakeholders, yielding material

The reach of the migration as adaptation policy ideal is limited in Senegal

All interviewed actors agreed that migration could play a role in achieving environmental or climate adaptation objectives in principle. That migration and adaptation are related in some way was intuitive and obvious to all. However, when reflecting on how they would define migration as adaptation for their own context and purposes, interviewees identified problematic premises that undermined its conceptual validity and potential operationalisation.

First, almost all interviewees questioned the

Conclusion

Our findings contribute to a small but growing body of research on the reception and use of ‘migration as adaptation’ in national contexts. The ‘migration as adaptation’ policy ideal has found modest and varying purchase among internal and external development sector stakeholders in Senegal. This mainly depended on the meaning given to this policy ideal. Working directly or indirectly for (European) governmental institutions or agencies appeared to be a significant factor leading to the

CRediT authorship contribution statement

This article is based on original research and has not been submitted elsewhere. Both authors contributed significantly to the writing of the original draft and the editing through collaboration on conceptualisation, methodology, formal analysis and validation. The lead author, Samuel Lietaer, did the investigation in Senegal. The three research trips in Senegal were part of his doctoral work and have been made possible within the Migradapt-project directed by prof. Dr. François Gemenne and

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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