ReliefWeb

François Gemenne and Julia Blocher

Introduction Migration studies have long considered migration as a positive process aimed at adjusting to changes. One of the founders of migration studies, Ravenstein (1885), described migration as “life and progress”, whereas a sedentary population meant “stagnation”. Drawing on the New Economics of Migration, there is much empirical evidence to show that migration is an adaptation strategy which households use to diversify and support their livelihood strategies (Castles and Delgado Wise, 2008; Massey et al., 2007). Although discussed often, the application of the adaptation–migration nexus to the field of environmental and climate change has not been empirically tested. Furthermore, the policy apparatus needed to deliver this potential has not been developed or assessed (Adger, 1999; Barnett and Webber, 2010; McLeman and Smit, 2006).

For the public and decision makers, migration is still commonly perceived as a failure to adapt. The lack of consensus on definitions and terms, and confusion over the basic concepts in discussions of migration as it pertains to adaptation, make it difficult to promote the issue in the development and implementation of adaptation measures. A key challenge facing scholars today is to flesh out the relationship between migration and adaptation, beyond the common wishful thinking of migration as a new adaptation strategy, a positive and somewhat performative vision of mobility. In this working paper, we conceive of migration as one strategy in the pre-existing livelihood trajectories and complex adaptive response system of households. Migration may ultimately have adaptive effects, that is, increasing households’ resilience to future changes; or, conversely, it may have maladaptive effects, further diminishing household resources and capacities.

In view of this complex phenomenon of migration, an important question arises surrounding the extent to which the literature on “environmental migration” conflates migration and adaptation. Considering migration as adaptation solely in regard to environmental changes may imply these movements exist outside the “normal” adaptation strategies. This creates a prescriptive view of migration from a sedentarist perspective and neglects the utility of non-environmental migration as an adaptive measure. This view thus leaves it to the outside observer to determine when and how adaptation is “successful” or “maladaptive”.

Less work has been produced exploring migration as adaptation to non-environmental factors. As it is difficult to determine who the “environmental” migrants are, there are methodological challenges to accurately judge how migration contributes to adaptation of affected communities to climate change and environmental changes at large.

In order to attain greater clarity, more empirical evidence is required to clarify the processes underlying the migration–adaptation nexus. This is the goal of the Migration, Environmental and Climate Change:
Evidence for Policy (MECLEP) project.5 The present working paper serves as a point of departure for the research strategy of the MECLEP project.

The objective of this conceptual and methodological paper is therefore to flag different possible choices that can be made to study the relationship between migration and adaptation. Several methodological choices arise:

Should one study the effects of migration in the broad sense or specifically the effects of migration related to environmental changes? Following this, should scholars investigate these effects on the migrant, the community of origin, the community of destination, or all of the above? In the interest of answering these questions, this paper emphasizes the impacts of migration rather than the causes.