The bordering and rebordering of climate mobilities: towards a plurality of relations

Abstract

The relation between climate change and migration is subject to fast growing attention in scientific, policy, and public discourse. It is also subject to numerous representations and containment measures that carve out a new form of migration; one that includes visions of which populations deserve protection, should be stopped, or made mobile, and what areas are worth saving. This article interrogates these processes of bordering associated with climate mobilities research and policymaking, whilst also exploring how border-mobility relations and associated processes of bordering might be changed or rethought in a changing climate. Drawing on empirical examples from different world contexts—ranging from the Pacific to Southern Europe, we centre on the plural and contested ways in which borders in relation to climate mobilities manifest themselves in both geopolitical, conceptual, and cognitive terms, and in doing so build on, but also move beyond, literature examining the securitisation and exclusionary effect of borders vis-à-vis climate mobilities. We signal how a critical understanding of bordering further exposes classifications of so-called internal or international climate migration, of the un/deserving migrant, of the environmental un/privileged; and demonstrate how climate im/mobilities themselves feed into, resist, reshape, or even reimagine processes of (re)bordering.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• mobilities
• migration
• borders
• (re)bordering
• power

Introduction

Though still a niche in migration and mobilities literature, research on the relation between climate change and human mobility has rapidly proliferated over the years. It has moved beyond its preliminary somewhat linear focus on climate refugees or climate change-induced migration to one of understanding the plural and political relations that shape the climate change and human mobility nexus (Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019; Baldwin and Fornalé 2017; Boas et al. 2022; De Sherbinin et al. 2022; Parsons 2019; Piguet 2022; Suliman et al. 2019; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019). There have, in particular, been efforts to reveal and understand the political nature of this nexus, a nexus which we refer to as climate mobilities (Baldwin 2016; Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019; Boas et al. 2019, 2022; Cundill et al. 2021; Parsons 2019); centring on the ways in which climate mobilities, as with mobilities more generally, are implicated in social relations that produce and distribute power (Baldwin 2016; Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019; Cresswell 2010; Parsons 2019; Sheller 2020). A well-known example of climate mobilities politics is the scripting of international border-crossing by so-called climate migrants as a security threat, a scripting which, while influential in some policy arenas, has also been strongly critiqued (Bettini 2013; Hartmann 2010; White 2011). There are also myriad other ways in which politics shapes and is shaped by climate mobilities, such as the ways in which climate-affected communities and migrants themselves are political agents with potential to challenge the institutions that shape environmental degradations and vulnerability, and to drive their own solutions to climate-related risks (Ransan-Cooper et al. 2015; Sakdapolrak et al. 2016; Samaddar 2020; Suliman et al. 2019). As with all aspects of social life, from household decision-making to global-scale policies, the ways in which climate change and mobility is discussed, acted upon, and experienced is always, to some extent, political.

In this paper, we seek to demonstrate the importance of climate mobilities politics with a focus on processes of bordering. In particular, we support the need for politically-attuned climate mobilities research to question rather than take-for-granted mobility categories that disavow borders as constructed (Bakewell 2008) or see people moving across ‘borders’ in particularly narrow ways. It is our aim to consider the ways in which borders themselves are constructed, reinforced, or contested in and through climate mobilities—of people, things, biophysical processes, and ideas (Crawford 2022; D’Souza 2015; Dalby 2021; Sheller 2020; Spiegel, Kachena, and Gudhlanga 2023). This includes a reflection on the ways in which climate mobilities research itself can risk perpetuating borders as natural (Dahinden 2016), and how a more explicit research interest in the processes of bordering could help to address that risk.

In doing so, we draw on recent works within the climate change research scholarly field that critically review the role of borders, and related concepts, such as territory and state sovereignty, in the context of the tele-connected and mobile nature of our world (D’Souza 2015; Dalby 2021). We concur with these works, and longer-standing insights within political geography and critical International Relations theory (e.g. Agnew 1994; Albert, Jacobson, and Lapid 2001; Banai et al. 2014; Baud and van Schendel 1997; Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Konrad 2015), that borders are not fixed, but mobile and contested. In building on the assumption of a ‘heterogenization of borders’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 3), we refrain from taking a normative stance towards borders, in the sense of arguing for more or less borders, or by arguing for a more cosmopolitan world-order vs. one celebrating the return of the nation state. As postcolonial and critical islands literature has shown (e.g. Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Chandler and Pugh 2020; Chao and Enari 2021; Hinds 2023; Stratford, Farbotko, and Lazrus 2013; Stratford et al. 2023), the nation state, borders, and sovereignty have come to mean different things; in many ways they still operate through Westphalian notions of territory and associated rights of in and exclusion (Dalby 2021), yet they have also been re-organised, re-appropriated and re-imagined (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Chao and Enari 2021; Das and Poole 2004; Hinds 2023; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Stratford, Farbotko, and Lazrus 2013). When drawing on indigenous epistemologies (Chao and Enari 2021; Suliman et al. 2019), borders can be understood as more than having in/exclusionary power but can be understood in relational ways—not just to territories, peoples, but also to nature and spirits—and can be seen as mobile and adaptable whilst semi-moored to ancestorial sites, reflecting a sense of emotion and embodiment.

Drawing on such insights, our approach aims to be analytical, adopting a reflexive, political, yet critical understanding of processes and meanings of bordering in relation to climate mobilities. Specifically, we do so by approaching the border as a method (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). This approach takes interest in the multiple, plural, and contested ways in which borders proliferate and manifest themselves, spatially and geographically, but also what this implies in conceptual and cognitive terms (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Scott 2021). Border as a method ‘is something more than methodological. It is above all a question of politics, about the kinds of social worlds and subjectivities produced at the border and the ways that thought and knowledge can intervene in these processes of production’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 17). This analytical perspective means going beyond a still-often focus on ‘the border’s capacity to exclude…’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, viii) to study the more plural social relations produced through or in relation to processes of bordering. In doing so, our interest in connecting climate mobilities research with questions of bordering, builds on, but at the same time also seeks to broaden research examining and critiquing the securitisation and exclusionary effect of borders in response to the myth of mass climate change-induced migration (Baldwin, Methmann, and Rothe 2014; Bettini 2013; Boas 2015; Durand-Delacre et al. 2021; Trombetta 2014; White 2011). Placing the border as an analytical focus of climate mobilities research, not as a fixed boundary but as a process to be understood, opens up many questions about climate borderlands, climate diasporas and citizenship, virtual or borderless climate nations, and other yet-to-be theorised climate mobility categories and futures, as yet relatively unexplored questions for empirical research and conceptual development.

We argue that more explicit attention to processes of bordering, in both geopolitical, conceptual, and cognitive terms, can enable the climate mobilities research community to (a) become more reflexive of how our own frames of analysis enact bordering processes and play into political and public debates on who or what is worth saving; (b) expose bordering processes in present-day policy-making that problematise and contain climate mobilities more so for the Global South than for the Global North, and how this feeds into the depicting and treatment of some places as safe and others as lost to a changing climate; (c) and next to exposing these processes of exclusion, be mindful of the ways in which borders are re-appropriated and re-imagined in more plural and relational ways through these climate im/mobilities, drawing on non-Westphalian understandings of territory, state, and sovereignty.

We proceed as follows: First, we further set out our understanding of climate mobilities in political terms. Second, we draw on wider debates in migration and mobilities studies that have long critically examined the concept of the border, and processes of bordering, in relation to mobility. Third, we apply these lenses to the study of climate mobilities, conceptually and supported by empirical illustrations taken from literature. We end with a reflection on the concept of climate mobility regimes, as to how governance frameworks on climate change and human mobility inform representations of the border-mobility-climate change nexus and the ways migrants and communities in question interact with these.

Climate mobilities as political

Climate mobilities research has long concentrated on the analysis of different drivers of mobility to establish the role of the environment (including climate change) in relation to other socio-economic drivers of mobility (e.g. Black et al. 2011). Whilst this tranche of work has been crucial in establishing the field of climate migration and mobilities studies, it often lacks a political perspective. Simply put, the analytical models developed tend to reduce the migrant to ‘a stark figure of the outsider caught in the various pulls’ (Samaddar 2020, 6), not explicitly engaging with mobility or migration as an act embedded in political relations. It pays insufficient attention to the fact that even the process of defining the ‘climate migrant’ is an attempted bordering, to carve out a new form of migration. As Samaddar (2020, 6) puts it, the actor in that process lacks political specificity: ‘what is the figure of the migrant in this age of mixed and massive flows?’ In the case of the climate migrant, attempts to quantify and predict tend to occur within and in support of the ‘political currency’ of climate mobilities research (Nicholson 2014). Despite a credible body of research on climate change and human mobility, misconceptions about climate migration abound. An echo chamber of misconceptions has been identified, for instance, concerning the nexus of climate change, mass migration, and conflict that plays out in ‘headlines, press releases, and funding campaigns’ (Sturridge and Holloway 2022, 4). Further, no method has been found reliable enough to include ‘climate migrant’ or ‘climate displacement’ in official statistical reporting, and yet now debunked figures reaching the level of billion predicted climate migrants by 2050 are widely reproduced by credible international organisations. The International Organisation for Migration, for instance, makes two divergent assertions in the same paragraph in the Environmental Migration section of its website, that ‘there are no reliable estimates of climate change induced migration’ and that ‘future forecasts vary from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050, moving either within their countries or across borders, on a permanent or temporary basis, with 200 million being the most widely cited estimate’ (IOM 2023, np). Narratives, such as these have contributed to a misinformed expectation that mass climate migration across international borders is both imminent and probable (Bettini 2013; Boas et al. 2019; Hartmann 2010; De Hass et al. 2019). Such expectations are supported by problematic practices in the production and use of climate migration research, such as ongoing citation of discredited projections of climate migration, or claims about the ongoing policy relevance of debunked climate mobility models (Farbotko et al. 2023). With unreliable and yet widely cited predicted large numbers circulating, climate migration is conceptually elusive and unable to be included in official statistics; and yet many cases of human mobility are now reported on and discussed as a consequence of climate change—research now regularly precedes on the assumption that all disaster-displacement is climate-induced, and those displaced during disasters are starting to be regularly described as all being ‘displaced by climate change’.

Further centring the political in the study of climate mobilities allows for a greater focus and appreciation of the role of the migrant—the mobile actor if wanting to use a more neutral wording—in relation to borders and boundaries, conceptually and geopolitically. In understanding the politics of mobilities, we draw on Cresswell's work (2010, 21), referring to the ‘ways in which mobilities are both productive of …social relations and produced by them’, referring to social relations that ‘involve the production and distribution of power’. Think of gender relations, nationalities, regulations, etc. In this view, it is about migrants’ levels of agency and limits therein, and their relations to the environment, other actors, infrastructures, and regimes of power, when having to move (see also Samaddar 2020; Sheller 2018, 2020; Suliman et al. 2019). As work in mobilities research has shown: individuals, households, or larger groups are not passive agents, but seek to navigate the web of rules, infrastructures, and climate risks when having to move; trying to challenge it, circumvent it, or trying to abide by it or even strengthening it (Bærenholdt 2013; Parsons 2019; Schapendonk 2018; Sheller 2020; Spiegel, Kachena, and Gudhlanga 2023; Suliman et al. 2019). Take the example of nomadic fishers and pastoralists in the West African borderlands. Their mobilities are increasingly classified as problematic, and even potentially ‘dangerous’, in the context of political concerns over ‘illegal’ fishing and overgrazing, influxes of violent extremism, human trafficking, and ‘illegal’ migration to the EU (see discussions in Leonhardt 2019). Simultaneously, nomadic communities are trying to adapt to these political pressures and conflicts, in addition to ongoing climatic changes and other sources of environmental degradation affecting their mobile practices, sometimes by choosing a different livelihood but also by finding ways to avoid sites of control or by actively seeking to shape policy and political decisions via protest or more formal policy engagement (Liehr, Drees, and Hummel 2016; see also Pas 2019 for such dynamics in Eastern Africa). There are for instance pastoralist groups, such as the Thabital Pulaaku, that have been advocating for the maintenance of nomadic culture and lifestyles. They do so as a response to policies that impede on mobile lifestyles and pastoralist traditions: such as policies promoting cattle ranching in which cattle are housed, kept in fences, and fed, to go against the mobile pastoralist practice of cattle herding (Tonah 2000, 2022). These policies were often initiated in the context of conflicts between the interests of farmers and pastoralists, for example in Ghana (Bukari 2023), but are also discursively connected to ongoing debates on the environmental impact of cattle herding, especially given the worsening effects of climate change for grazing areas (Brottem 2016).

Another example of such political acts comes from the Pacific Islands, where citizens of Tuvalu are reclaiming and redefining their territory which has often been described as highly exposed to climate change impacts and potentially unliveable (Farbotko 2022). Urban-rural mobility to the small islet of Funafala is framed by those moving as a revitalization of their Indigenous culture. Their mobilities are a way to reclaim, repossess and revitalise a culturally significant place, and reclaim the meaning of habitability in the face of climate risk. Such mobilities can reject donor and media-driven narratives of unavoidable relocation and instead reaffirm Indigenous rights and identities (Bordner, Ferguson, and Ortolano 2020; Farbotko 2022).

These examples show how climate mobilities are implicated in the social relations that produce and distribute power, and thus are political: mobilities are both productive of social relations of power and produced by them (Cresswell 2010). Specifically, to follow Cresswell’s work, mobility power relations involve the scripting of movement by those moving themselves and others, the physical facts of the moving of humans, and the experience or practice of movement (Cresswell 2010). From this perspective, climate change can be part of not only the fact of movement of people but also the ways in which movement is experienced and scripted: it may not be the bio-physical dynamics of climate that are most important in a particular context but the representational: people may just as well move (or not move) because of particular kinds of policy or communication about climate change impacts—such as adaptation strategies by government that promote greater mobility or rather endorse settlement over mobility (e.g. Lindegaard 2018; Warner and Wiegel 2021; Zickgraf 2019). A climate mobility politics simultaneously apprehends not only where climate mobilities occur, who is involved, and how it is experienced, but links these to the scripting of climate mobilities in arenas, such as research, policies, activism, documentaries, and media reports that seek to make climate mobilities visible and knowable (Durand-Delacre 2022; Farbotko 2017; Methmann 2014).

De-migranticisation and mobilities

Our specific interest in the processes of bordering in the context of climate mobilities politics is informed by a broader debate in migration and mobilities literature on what has been termed by Dahinden (2016) the demigranticization of research on migration and integration. Dahinden (2016, 2218) poses that:

migration and integration research runs the risk of supporting the view that migration-related difference is naturally given, even while it is trying to be critical of this paradigm…. To put it bluntly: without the formation and existence of modern states, there would be no migration and integration research.

This is not to say there would be no mobility. But it would in such a situation not be labelled as migration, so she argues. Dahinden’s analysis is that much of migration research is still stuck in ‘methodological nationalism’ (see Beck 2005; Mol and Spaargaren 2013 for a longer review of this debate), taking the nation state as a given and as a starting point of analysis whereby ‘the national container remains the more important reference system for empirical research and theories’ (Dahinden 2016, 2209), of which the ‘border’ is a crucial part.

In similar vein, other migration and mobilities scholars have warned of the exceptionalist focus of migration research (Dahinden 2016; Samaddar 2020; Schapendonk, Bolay, and Dahinden 2021). As Samaddar (2020, 23) argues:

the refugee condition or the condition of forced migration is considered exceptional, following Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. In this idea of exception is a tremendous force of generalization. It is based on the binary of exceptionality and banality. The power of the binary compels the scholars of refugee and forced migration studies to think of the subject in the framework of exception.

Following these concerns, several scholars have unveiled the bias in migration research for assuming that staying in place is considered the normal, to be desired, and that a population movement consists of moving out of that place into a new one, with the urge to settle (Dahinden 2016; Schewel 2020). Meanwhile, it can be overlooked how journeys are plural, consisting of different places of rest, of moments or periods of relative stillness, and of different stages and directions of movement, with the one not per se to be valued over the other (Sheller 2018; Schapendonk and Steel 2014).

These warnings are not per se new in climate mobilities research, yet still, a vast amount of climate mobilities scholarship operates through terms that risk naturalising the border. This becomes particularly clear through a recent surge in research on what has been termed internal climate migration (for overviews of recent research see Hoffmann, Šedová, and Vinke 2021; Benveniste, Oppenheimer, and Fleurbaey 2022; Piguet 2022), examining climate im/mobilities within the confines of the nation state, which (unintentionally) also legitimates the presence and exclusionary effect of state borders. Adding to that, the majority of climate mobilities research is conducted through case-study approaches (Piguet 2022), not per se paying attention to the translocal connections that travel and relate across a wider space.

The latter omission is nonetheless gaining increasing attention, through the recent introductions of translocal and mobilities thinking within the field (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013; Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019; Boas et al. 2022; Cundill et al. 2021; Zoomers et al. 2021; Parsons 2019; Sakdapolrak et al. 2016; Suliman et al. 2019; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019), connected with the longer existing critiques of bordering, framing and securitising attempts of media and policy actors that maintain the myth of climate mass migration (Baldwin, Methmann, and Rothe 2014; Bettini 2013; Boas et al. 2019; Dalby 2021; Hartmann 2010; Trombetta 2014; White 2011). In that context, Dahinden (2016) points to the disciplinary field of mobilities, the basis of this journal, as a possible avenue to obtain a more plural perspective to the study of migration. The words mobility and mobilities are less politically loaded than ‘migration’, less associated with the nation state, more analytical, and the focus of mobilities studies is broader seeing mobility as fundamental to social life.¹ As the concept of mobilities includes ‘not only physical movement but also potential movement, blocked movement or paused movement, immobilization and forms of stillness, dwelling, and placemaking…in relation to wider transnational mobility systems’ (Sheller 2018, 18), it has an explicit interest in studying unequal mobilities, such as the mobilities of the privileged travellers (e.g. of tourists, researchers, humanitarian workers) or the privileged citizens (e.g. those living in climate safe areas, in green social spaces) in relation to the mobilities and immobilities of the less privileged (those classified as migrants, or refugees, those unable to get visas, etc.), and how these differences are shaped by larger—often transnational—mobility regimes, of which processes of international bordering are an important part (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Kloppenburg 2013; Sheller 2018, 2020; Sun-Hee Park and Pellow 2019). In that sense, the role of the state comes into play to assess the politics of human mobility, but as a specific object of critical study, as opposed to taking it for granted as having an undisputed role in defining what constitutes internal or international migration.

Border as a method in climate mobilities research

These arguments invite climate mobilities scholars to take borders seriously—as a method of inquiry, an ‘epistemological device’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 16), which prioritises neither the study of climate mobilities within or across state borders, and which, when empirically relevant, examines and problematises the notion of the border itself in the context of human mobility and climate change, including the role that processes of bordering play in the knowledge production of climate mobilities relations. Borders are understood as inherently dynamic processes rather than physical lines of separation (or a static notion of a border as a pre-given pattern or category), as socially constructed (Baud and van Schendel 1997; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Newman 2006; Sheller 2020). Building on Mezzadra and Neilson (2013)’s conceptualisation of border as a method, we see bordering processes in relation to climate mobilities as unfolding in plural and relational ways, having a mix of geopolitical, conceptual, and cognitive implications, both in terms of spatial and temporal dimensions, and the level of discourse and everyday practice.

It is geopolitical in the sense of climate change impacts able to drastically shift territorial lines that for long have been understood to be the national border. Climate change does not respect anthropogenic borders, nor are borders themselves as defined in international law necessarily immune from climate change impacts and may change as a result (Burkett 2011; Crawford 2022). This dynamic is not new to the world of scholarship and policy, though still operating at the margins of attention in climate mobilities research (Burkett 2011; Piguet 2019; Dalby 2021; Stratford, Farbotko, and Lazrus 2013). Anticipating such changes, Tuvalu and other island states are now working on mapping fixed points in space to permanently define their Exclusive Economic Zones with respect to maritime boundaries, to avoid having their sea territory shrink if their land territory recedes due to coastal erosion or sea level rise. The Tuvalu ‘government now insists that all countries forming relations with Tuvalu recognise the statehood of the nation as permanent and its existing maritime boundaries as set, even if Tuvalu loses its land territory due to sea level rise’ (Kofe 2021a). Tuvalu’s definition of permanent maritime boundaries that envelops existing Tuvalu sovereign space depends on other states recognising this fundamental change to the current international law of the sea (Freestone and Schofield 2021). Tuvalu is also working on another innovation, a fully digital Tuvalu national government, again attempting to ensure that current rights of statehood are maintained regardless of what happens to the land territory (Kofe 2021b). This raises the question of how climate mobilities and immobilities of Tuvaluan people themselves might, in the future, be situated in relation to these maritime and virtual borders.

These newly emerging understandings and reformulations of the state, of borders, of adaptation, and physical geography as such, shows how the era of climate change is tied in with conceptual questions about borders and mobilities. This makes the scripting role of borders an explicit object of inquiry in climate mobilities research; as to how it enables or disables statehood and self-determination in situations of lands loss; how it frames some movement as ‘illegal’ and others as ‘normal’ or ‘regulated’; how it restricts or facilitates movements or fuels ‘internal’ climate mobility by blocking routes to further destinations. A critical enquiry into the process of bordering can bring together critiques of ‘environmental privilege’ with climate mobilities research. Sun-Hee Park and Pellow (2019, 395) for instance point to ‘the construction of exclusive environmental amenities, such as clean air and water, open space, and safe neighborhood’ and how marginalised groups, such as refugees, stateless persons, and undocumented migrants, become excluded from safe environmental spaces, which at the same time is becoming a more valuable right in times of global warming.

Yet, processes of bordering are also about agency. It is about the practice of (re)bordering, the struggles, and contestations that come into play, leading to reorganised forms of socio-political relations (Chao and Enari 2021; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Scott 2021; Sheller 2020). For instance, the governments and climate activist of several Pacific Island States actively utilise national borders, state sovereignty, and connected rights for self-determination to prevent international interference with, whilst strengthening indigenous ownership over, their approaches to climate change adaptation and their climate im/mobilities futures (Bordner, Ferguson, and Ortolano 2020; Farbotko et al. 2023). It is also about the political acts by migrants, communities, or other actors, that support, resist, or challenge borders and their politics of bordering. Take for instance nomadic pastoralists from Eastern Africa, such as the Maasai, seeking to resist the border, in particular in periods of severe drought—borders of private ranches and wild life reserves that keep pastoralists and their cattle out (Boas 2022; Galaty 2013; Pas 2019; Pas and Cavanagh 2022), or borders of neighbouring countries or internal county borders seeking to shape the directions of pastoralists movements; each examples of made borders in what pastoralists consider as their ancestorial lands. In West Africa, to draw on a related example, cross-border pastoralist movement (transhumance) has long been acknowledged as a valuable economic activity (Bukari and Osei-Kufuor 2022; ECOWAS 1998). Here, pastoralist groups regularly move across political borders, which has been recognised and facilitated (at least to an extent) by the Protocol on Transhumance by the Economic community of West African States (ECOWAS 1998). At the same time, also here, these pastoralist movements face increasing restrictions. Pastoralists migrating across borders in West Africa have been seen as a security threat because of rise in terrorist attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria. As a consequence, national governments in West Africa have tightened border security and pushed back many Fulani pastoralists moving across borders (Leonhardt 2019; Mouthaan 2022); a narrative which the Fulani at the same time seek to resist, whilst at the same time adjusting their mobility practices and routes to avoid risk and tensions (Brottem 2021; Turner and Schlecht 2019).

These practices of bordering and re-bordering also very much relate to the cognitive dimensions of borders entailing meaning- and sense-making (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Scott 2021). In this way, as argued by Scott (2021, 798), borders ‘emerge in the interaction between imagined and experienced space’. In that context, for pastoralist groups—to continue with the previous example—political borders often mean something different than they do for the modern-day state; they perceive it as something constructed, something imposed, and in need of alteration which they amongst others try to achieve by bringing together diverse groups that envision new land and border relations (Boas 2022; Brottem 2021; Turner and Schlecht 2019).

Understanding the border as a process opens up climate mobilities research to helpful new concepts (new to the climate mobilities field, yet long existing), such as the concept of borderlands, finding its roots in critical migration and border studies, with a long history of studies on borderlands (Baud and van Schendel 1997; Nugent 2019; Samaddar 2020; Van Schendel 2004), and which we can study for its relations with a changing climate. Climate mobilities can take place in contested borderlands—such as in the pastoralism example above or with other forms of seasonal or labour movement, such as in the Bengal borderlands on the Bangladesh-India border (Van Schendel 2004). Here many environmental and climatic changes impact areas of land that are divided by political borders, which may add to the changing nature and contestations of those borders that are often already part of a dynamic and mobile socio-environmental space (Cons 2018; Paprocki 2020; Samaddar 2020; Shewly and Nadiruzzaman 2017).

Climate mobility regimes

A focus on borders brings with it an interest in studying regimes of governance and their capacities to steer climate mobilities within and across borders. Mobilities, including climate mobilities, are shaped by a large network of flows and levels of control, including transnational mobility regimes whose influences reaches far. For example, Sheller (2020) shows how a disaster in Haiti—seemingly a local and isolated island-based affair—is embedded in larger constellation of interconnected and multi-scalar mobilities. Caribbean islands are key sites of globalisation where the histories of colonialization, slavery, neoliberalism, offshoring, humanitarianism, and tourism all come together in shaping political economy of the islands. These global-local interactions and the associated mobility regimes have resulted in stark inequalities, for example in terms of who can and who cannot leave the island, cross its borders, with the local population mostly bound to stay on the island also in situations of high exposure to climate extremes, whereas the humanitarian workers or the tourists are free to move in and out of the island (Sheller 2020).

To connect these works on mobility regimes more specifically to the study of climate mobilities, we draw on the term climate mobility regimes (Boas et al. 2022). It builds on existing concepts of ‘mobility regimes’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Kloppenburg 2013; Schapendonk et al. 2020; Sheller 2020), but it also ties in the concept of ‘climate adaptation regimes’ that comes from critical climate adaptation literature (Paprocki 2018; see also Baruah 2001; Basu, Roy, and Samaddar 2018, on the related concept of ‘resource-utilisation regimes’). In bringing these together, the concept of climate mobility regimes examines how the mobility/migration and climate adaptation apparatus are working in tandem in governing and depicting the relation between climate change and mobility and its relation with the border. Climate mobility regimes are networked arrangements that involve a range of actors in addition to state governments, such as intergovernmental organisations, NGOs, scientists, and the media. They may operate on the level of a specific borderland setting, but have larger transnational and global dimensions, e.g. by connections with the global climate and mobility regimes. Just as with borders, these regimes are not fixed entities. They may be reproduced but also contested, circumvented, or renegotiated by those governed by it or travelling through them (Paprocki 2018; Schapendonk 2018; Schwarz 2020; Sheller 2018, 2020).

To exemplify the performativity of climate mobility regimes, including their global character, we use the case of the recent World Bank Groundswell Reports (e.g. Rigaud et al. 2021). Given the impact and visibility of these reports, the actors involved—the World Bank, the scientists as lead authors, and national and regional policy actors involved in feeding its narratives—have become central ‘agents’ in shaping climate mobility regimes in the regions that their reports have focused on, such as the region of West Africa (Rigaud et al. 2021). The case of the Groundswell Reports is particularly interesting because of its bordering power. The reports provide a range of numerical scenarios about future climate change-induced migration. Whilst the reports label their object of inquiry ‘internal climate migration’, their numerical projections, especially those of the upper-level, still can fuel an image of mass climate migration. In a way, by emphasising the focus of internal climate mobility, the report indirectly enhances the concept of the border; suggesting internal climate migration is something different, perhaps more manageable, but thereby also inducing fear (not per se intentionally) of the what if: what if the mobility cannot be contained? In this way, it well resonates with the migration agenda of the European Union, which as part of its strategy seeks to prevent migration from different regions in Africa towards the EU by promoting development in-situ and also does by warning for climate mass migration and security threats if no such action is taken (Boas et al. 2019; Trombetta 2014). As such, an emphasis in these climate mobility regimes, in which the World Bank and the EU are central actors, is on the promotion of local, urban, and regional development and resilience, so that communities at risk become adaptive to the changes ahead, including to the enhanced mobility that will characterise future livelihoods, also avoiding a possible future of mass and uncontainable flows. This dynamic also reflects the earlier point on environmental privilege, of the richer nations seeking to keep new inflows of people out and to instead focus on its own population in the safeguarding of access to a safe environmental space (Sun-Hee Park and Pellow 2019). It also mirrors how regions of the Global North tend to focus their resources and energy on their ‘own’ populations as ‘deserving migrants’ (El-Enany 2013), focussing their energy on climate displaced ‘citizens’ or European ‘tourists’, for example during the recent extreme heat waves and hailstorms that hit Southern and Eastern Europe in the summer of 2023.

Also in that context, despite extreme manifestations of climate change in many regions of the Global North, interesting to note is how the World Bank internal climate mobility projections have mostly been done for regions in the Global South—notably for parts of Africa, Asia, the Pacific (with the exception of Eastern Europe), and not (or at least not yet) for North America, Australia, or Western Europe. Interesting is how this mirrors a bias within global climate mobility regimes as to where potentially ‘problematic’ climate im/mobilities may occur, and how this again furthers a conceptual bordering and geographical demarcation as to whom, what, when, and where is considered a climate migrant (see also Piguet et al. 2018). As argued by Piguet et al. (2018, 359), both the research and policy field of climate mobilities remains haunted by a ‘post-colonial imagination—which sees the archetypal victim of climate change as a poor peasant from the South’.

Another example of the workings of climate mobility regimes comes from the Pacific, where we see a stark divide between climate mobility regimes and more general mobility regimes. As the work by Bordner, Ferguson, and Ortolano (2020) and Farbotko (2022) shows, climate mobility regimes, with aid donors and international media, have been rather influential in putting forward an image of the Pacific facing inevitable relocation in the context of climate change. Yet, there are also other mobility arrangements that work quite independently from these climate change narratives and even actively resist it, to maintain a frame of international mobility in the Pacific region as labour migration. Temporary labour migration, with migrants bringing or sending back additional funds, new knowledge, upgraded skills, and other resources, can help to build resilience among communities in climate vulnerable areas (Barnett and Webber 2010). International labour migration is increasingly listed as a component of overall climate change adaptation and climate mobility policies in migrant-sending Pacific Island countries, particularly the smaller, atoll states, such as Tuvalu and Kiribati. A Pacific Islands regional framework on climate mobility, currently under development, also sees international labour migration as having adaptation potential (Farbotko et al. 2022; Thornton et al. 2021). However, the labour mobility programmes currently offered by Australia and New Zealand in which Pacific Island workers participate do not currently recognise the concept of migration-as-adaptation. Indeed, the programmes have, since their inception, been framed singularly in economic terms. They have no explicit mechanisms for improving adaptation outcomes in workers’ home communities [e.g. through building skills in climate resilient agriculture (Davila et al. 2021)]. This is despite overall development assistance policies that regard climate mainstreaming as crucial. Workers from the Pacific Islands are crossing an international border from climate vulnerable places into more industrialised countries which have produced greater emissions, with the border here a reminder of the work that needs to be done to develop integrated climate mobility policies. Instead, temporary labour migration programmes frame Pacific Island citizens singularly as ‘labour supply’, depending on highly troublesome ideas of ‘racialised labour relations that look to the Pacific as a source of plentiful, compliant, cheap and ultimately disposable labour that can be imported as needed and exported again when no longer required’ (Stead and Davies 2021, 411). Some of the ways that migrants are exerting political agency include taking legal action against allegedly exploitative employers (Marie 2022), and using their time working abroad to consider the merits and disadvantages for themselves and their families of moving to a larger, industrialised country in the context of a changing climate (Farbotko et al. 2022).

A question that can be raised is whether climate-affected communities or migrants are always able to exercise political agency to challenge (climate) mobility regimes in power. Not everyone has the capacity to do so. Still, acts of silence, or physical acts in the absence of speech, can be considered political (Hansen 2000), just as acts of immobility can have performative effects (Adey 2006; Farbotko 2022; Samaddar 2020). We thus can study these acts, their meanings and implications, and the extent of their abilities to contest or engage with borders and respective climate mobility regimes in shaping climate mobilities.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have put forward an argument to study the multiple, plural, and contested ways in which borders—geopolitically, conceptually, and in cognitive terms—relate to climate im/mobilities. This includes the often-discussed exclusionary effect of borders in terms of border controls and securitisation attempts, prioritising the needs of some over others, but also how the concept of climate migration in itself is a process of bordering, emerging as a new category of migration that feeds the debates as to who are deserving migrants or which populations and landscapes worth saving in a changing climate. Building on Mezzadra and Neilson (2013), we also move beyond the exclusionary understanding of the border, and drawing on postcolonial literature (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Chao and Enari 2021; Hinds 2023; Suliman et al. 2019), our approach asks how borders are contested and re-shaped over time and relate in relation to territories, nature, peoples, ancestorial and cultural dimensions and related processes of sense-making. This ranges from the ways pastoralists contest or even deny modern-day borders through socio-environmental entanglements with a vast set of landscapes, to how the inhabitants of Tuvalu draw on bordering to safeguard and express their ancestorial bonds, cultural practices, and relations between oceans, islands, and peoples, in times of rising sea-levels and related geopolitical pressures.

The study of bordering remains relevant despite much recent work conceptualising climate mobility as local, and largely internal (of states). As McLeman argues (2019), it is important to investigate and actively scrutinise the policies and behaviours of possible destination countries in this debate, and more broadly, we argue, there is a need to question and better understand, rather than assume (often Western-imposed), policy categories that often feature in climate mobilities research, and understand how these feed into bordering policy discourse. It is thus, we argue, timely and useful to go beyond consideration of climate mobilities and borders in taken-for-granted terms—as if fitting the boxes of internal migration, mobility within states, or as part of international or intercontinental flows of migration. Instead, if we are to fully understand the politics of climate mobilities, we should actively scrutinise such reference points and examine how they interact with and are shaped by bordering processes, and vice versa.

Acknowledgements

We thank Ranabir Samaddar, Roel Riphagen, and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The paper was written in the context of Ingrid Boas’ Vidi project on climate change-related mobility in the borderlands, grant number VI.Vidi.201.138. Carol Farbotko acknowledges the Australian Research Council funding: FT210100512.

Notes

1 This is at the same time a reason why others opt to use the term migration, especially as mobility seems too neutral, avoids such controversy and political debate, see discussion Samaddar (2020) and Skeldon (2015).