Migration and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The relationship between the environment and migration is most often addressed through two major issues: the ways in which environmental change relates to decisions to move, and the ways in which migrants either leaving or arriving in a particular place affect the environment. Recent literature addressing both of these issues, while building upon long-standing debates on migration and the relationship between population and the environment, now focuses on case-specific understandings of the local social relations that give the environment and natural resources value and meaning in particular places.

Maximalist Versus Minimalist

Historically, the study of the relationship between the environment and the decision to migrate has taken shape through debates about the definition and legal standing of environmental migrants and environmental refugees. The debate about what constitutes an environmental refugee is largely divided into two camps. The first of these takes a maximalist point of view to the role of environmental change in migration decision making, in which environmental degradation is a cause of insecurity that “displaces” people by causing them to seek out settings of greater safety and certainty. This approach to understanding the relationship between migration and the environment works best in situations of sudden, dramatic change, such as coastal inundation or volcanic eruption. In cases of gradual environmental change, however, the decision to move is often considered alongside of, or in combination with, other factors such as the economic and social situation of the decision maker. Writers who recognize this complexity follow a second, “minimalist” approach to the relationship between environment and migration, arguing that one cannot separate the political and the economic from the environmental when considering migration decision making. This argument arises most clearly when researchers question what constitutes a “legitimate” push for migration, but while they point out the complex links among environment, economy, and politics in migration decision making, very little of this work systematically engages how the environment, as one of a suite of drivers in a specific context, becomes integrated with economic and political concerns.

While the minimalist and maximalist literatures continue to inform scholarly and legal debates over the definition and status of those who move, at least in part, due to reasons of environmental change, this discussion limits the ways in which this relationship is conceptualized and therefore does not speak to the intersection of larger political ecological and migration issues that will better inform our understanding of the environmental change/migration nexus. Recent work in migration, however, runs closely parallel to contemporary interests in political ecology, suggesting new paths for the consideration of the migration and environment nexus.

Neoclassical Versus Political Economy

The broader migration literature has been dominated by two conceptual camps: neoclassical/rational choice and political economy/Marxist. While seemingly opposed approaches to understanding migration decision making, with the neoclassical/rational choice emphasis on individual maximization and the political economy/Marxist focus on structural shifts in the economy, a number of authors have pointed out their shared shortcomings. Vinat Gidwani and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan offer the broadest critique of both schools, arguing that neither offers any interrogation of a modernist rationality that reduces the migrant and migration to a “necessary, if sometimes unfortunate, subplot in the unfolding of history.”

The problems that neoclassical/rational choice and political economy/Marxist approaches to migration share have prompted a number of critics to offer their own alternatives to these dominant schools. Many of these critiques aim to understand, as Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan put it, “how migrants apprehend, negotiate, and transform the social structures that impinge on their lives.” The diverse approaches that result from these critiques range from efforts to explore the transformative power of consumption to exploration of the voices of migrants.

These alternative migration approaches are important parallels to contemporary work in political ecology, especially feminist political ecology, that focuses on uneven access to and control over resources. Specifically, these literatures share an understanding of the importance of local social relations in human perception and decision making. These social relations, therefore, serve as a point of contact between the migration literature, which attempts to understand migrant subjectivity, and the political ecological literature, which attempts to understand the social construction of natural/environmental resources and their use. This point of contact creates the potential for a link between environmental change and migrant subjectivities.

Environmental Degradation

The other major area of concern with migration and the environment is the relationship between migration and environmental degradation. Historically, little attention was paid to this issue within population and refugee studies, with organizations such as the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Red Cross, and the World Food Program conducting environmental assessments of potential refugee camps only since the early 1990s. Due to the paucity of data on the subject, there is no definitive understanding of the relative environmental impact of forced migrants versus those who elect to move, as case studies arguing both sides have been generated. For example, while circular migration has long been recognized as an important strategy for adding resilience to livelihoods, it may also serve as a means by which local land uses remain sustainable if farmers do not have to overexploit soils to make a living. However, the migration of labor to work in new areas, such as in the expansion of cocoa plantations in West Africa across the 20th century, may contribute to rapid environmental transformations as new land is brought under cultivation, enabled by the new supply of labor. In more extreme cases, the sudden arrival of large numbers of migrants or refugees into new areas, especially in the context of natural disaster or armed conflict, may overtax various local environmental functions and contribute to environmental degradation.

The contemporary focus on the relationship between environment and migration, regardless of whether one’s concerns are for environmental pushes or pulls, or for the environmental impact of migrants, is on making sense of the social relations through which the environment is understood in particular cases. For example, in the context of environmental migration, Edward R. Carr has constructed a minimalist framework focused not on the study of environmental conditions that drive migration, but on local intersections of power and knowledge in which environment, ecology, and politics are understood. In this framework, the ways migrants negotiate and transform their context, and the objectives behind such negotiation and transformation, are the condition and result of this understanding.

Sara R. Curran, in examining migrant impact on coastal ecosystems, focuses on the ways in which these migrants’ resource use and access is a function of the ways in which they are incorporated into social relations that define resource value and access in the new setting. These and other studies are part of a rethinking of the relationship between environment and migration that uses comprehensive understandings of complex local situations to build a foundation for future efforts at generalization.

Bibliography:

Diane Bates, “Environmental Refugees? Classifying Human Migrations Caused by Environmental Change,” Population and Environment (v.23/5, 2002);
Edward R. Carr, “Placing the Environment in Migration: Economy, Environment, and Power in Ghana’s Central Region,” Environment and Planning A (v.37/5, 2005);
Sara Curran, “Migration, Social Capital, and the Environment: Considering Migrant Selectivity and Networks in Relation to Coastal Ecosystems,” in W. Lutz, A. Prskawetz, and W.C. Sanderson, eds., Population and Environment: Methods of Analysis (Population Council, 2002);
Vinat Gidwani and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, “Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (v.93/1, 2003);
Gaim Kibreab, “Environmental Causes and Impact of Refugee Movements: A Critique of the Current Debate,” Disasters (v.21/1, 1997);
Steven Lonergan, “The Role of Environmental Degradation in Population Displacement,” Environmental Change and Human Security Project Research Report I (University of Victoria, 1998);
Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees: A Growing Phenomenon of the 21st Century,” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences (v.357/1420, 2002);
Rachel Silvey and Victoria A. Lawson, “Placing the Migrant,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (v.89/1, 1999);
Astri Suhrke, “Environmental Degradation and Population Flows,” Journal of International Affairs (v.47/2, 1994).