Situating ‘migration as adaptation’ discourse and appraising its relevance to Senegal’s development sector
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.
References (147)
- et al.
Challenging climate change and migration discourse: different understandings of timescale and temporality in the Maldives
Glob. Environ. Change
(2015) - et al.
The first climate refugees? Contesting global narratives of climate change in Tuvalu
Glob. Environ. Change
(2012) What makes climate change adaptation effective? A systematic review of the literature
Glob. Environ. Change
(2020)- et al.
Being(s) framed: the means and ends of framing environmental migrants
Glob. Environ. Change
(2015) - Adam, I., Trauner, F., Jegen, L., Roos, C., 2019, West African interests in (EU) migration policy. Policy Brief N° 4,...
- et al.
West African interests in (EU) migration policy. Balancing domestic priorities with external incentives
J. Ethn. Migr. Stud.
(2020) Why populations persist: mobility, place attachment and climate change
Popul. Environ.
(2016)- et al.
Human security
(2014) - et al.
Advancing a political ecology of global environmental discourses
Dev. Change
(2001) Climate and Development Strategy 2017-2022
(2017)
Human mobility in response to rainfall variability: opportunities for migration as a successful adaptation strategy in eight case studies
Migr. Dev.
The local turn in migration management: the IOM and the engagement of local authorities
J. Ethn. Migr. Stud.
Africa's Return Migrants: The New Developers?
Migration management for the benefit of whom? Interrogating the work of the International Organization for Migration
Citizsh. Stud.
Keeping them in their place: the ambivalent relationship between development and migration in Africa
Third World Q.
Adaptive migration: pluralising the debate on climate change and migration
Geogr. J.
Remittances for adaptation: an ‘alternative source’ of international climate finance?
Climate migration as an adaption strategy: desecuritizing climate-induced migration or making the unruly governable?
Crit. Stud. Secur.
Waltz with development: insights on the developmentalization of climate-induced migration
Migr. Dev.
One step forward, two steps back? The fading contours of (in)justice in competing discourses on climate migration
Geogr. J.
“Where next? Climate change, migration, and the (bio) politics of adaptation
Glob. Policy
Migration as adaptation
Nature
Climate migration myths
Nat. Clim. Change
Linking migration and adaptation to climate change. How stakeholder perceptions influence adaptation processes in Pakistan
Int. Asienforum
Leaving Place, Restoring Home: Enhancing the Evidence Base on Planned Relocation Cases in the Context of Hazards, Disasters, and Climate Change
Changements environnementaux et migration en Afrique de l′Ouest
Geopolitics of fear and the emergence of ‘climate refugees’: imaginative geographies of climate change and displacements in Bangladesh
J. Indian Ocean Reg.
Does Development Reduce Migration? IZA Discussion Papers 8592
Climate Refugees
Remittances, Migration, and Social Development: A Conceptual Review of the Literature (Programme on Social Policy and Development, Paper No. 34)
Environmental risk, resilience and migration: implications for natural resource management and agriculture
Environ. Res. Lett.
Les Investissements des Migrants dans la Vallée du Fleuve Sénégal: Confiance et Conflits d′Intérêts
Rev. Eur. Des. Migr. Int.
Changement climatique et migrations: qualification d′un problème, structuration d′un champ scientifique et activation de politiques publiques
Mondes En. dév.
The Policy Fallacy of promoting Return migration among Senegalese Transnationals
Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, and Migration. Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the document Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, An EU Strategy on adaptation to climate change
A Renewed Partnership with the Countries of the Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific
Climate migrants and new identities? The geopolitics of embracing or rejecting mobility
Soc. Cult. Geogr.
Relocation planning must address voluntary immobility
Nat. Clim. Change
Managing climate insecurity by ensuring continuous capital accumulation: ‘climate refugees’ and ‘climate migrants’
N. Political Econ.
“Neoliberalising adaptation to climate change: foresight or foreclosure?”
Environ. Plan. A
Cited by (7)
Research priorities for climate mobility
2024, One EarthA confirmatory factor model for climate justice: Integrating human development and climate actions in low carbon economies
2022, Environmental Science and PolicyCitation Excerpt :Finally, the State often has to protect socially vulnerable individuals; this is called “Protective Security”. At this point, combating extreme hunger and guaranteeing a minimum income for survival is not only part of the human development in a more socially broad context (Lietaer and Durand-Delacre, 2021), but also in the development of an individual in a specific context of climate change (Rao et al., 2017). In cases of extreme weather events, increased national immigration is the only way for individuals to return to minimum conditions of capability and to maintain their culture and customs (Shayegh, 2017).
Research in environmentally induced human mobility: an analysis of methodological and theoretical dimensions
2023, International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and ManagementLivelihood resilience of climate-induced displaced people in South Asia: Implications for Bangladesh
2023, Disaster, Displacement and Resilient Livelihoods: Perspectives from South AsiaHuman Mobility: The Invisible Issue in Climate Change Adaptation Policies: The Case of Morocco
2023, Climate Change Management