Managing Climate Insecurity by Ensuring Continuous Capital Accumulation: ‘Climate Refugees’ and ‘Climate Migrants’

Abstract

Numerous recent reports by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics and international organisations have focused on so-called ‘climate refugees’. This article examines the turn from a discourse of ‘climate refugees’, in which organisations perceive migration as a failure of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change, to one of ‘climate migration’, in which organisations promote migration as a strategy of adaptation. Its focus is the promotion of climate migration management, and it explores the trend of these discourses through two sections. First, it provides an empirical account of the two discourses, emphasising the differentiation between them. It then focuses on the discourse of climate migration, its origins, extent and content, and the associated practices of ‘migration management’. The second part argues that the turn to the promotion of ‘climate migration’ should be understood as a way to manage the insecurity created by climate change. However, international organisations enacts this management within the forms of neoliberal capitalism, including the framework of governance. Therefore, the promotion of ‘climate migration’ as a strategy of adaptation to climate change is located within the tendencies of neoliberalism and the reconfiguration of southern states' sovereignty through governance.

Keywords:

• migration
• climate change
• governance
• adaptation
• sovereignty
• global political economy

Notes

I wish to thank Noel Castree, Jean-Christophe Graz, Cynthia Kraus, Rahel Kunz and Raphael Ramuz, for their helps and comments in the preparation of this article. A version of this paper was presented at the CSE Trans-Pennine Working Group where it received useful comments from Werner Bonefeld, Greig Charnock, Hugo Radice, and Stuart Shields. My thanks also go to the three anonymous reviewers. All the usual disclaimers apply.

My opinion is that we should, rather, try to understand what NGOs and academics subsume under the concept of ‘climate refugees/migrants’ as being part of broader processes of dispossession that are linked to the development of capitalist relations of production. In this understanding, climate change does not directly ‘produce’ (forced) migration but is a set of phenomena that are experienced through highly complex and differentiated social mediations (including social forms such as property, money, state, law, etc.). This view is essential to avoiding the pervasive ‘climate washing’ discourse identified by Neil Smith, which actually totally externalises agency on a socially modified nature under the guise of accepting the socially created nature of climate change. Climate change, thus, becomes an all-powerful agent of social change, independently of social, political, or economic mediations (Smith 2008: 245). For a similar view on environmental refugees, especially regarding the social production of nature, see Gill (2010).

Note that yet another discourse, which is beyond the scope of the present article, has concomitantly developed another (related) view: that of climate refugees as posing a security threat. For a critique, see Hartmann (2010) and Oels (2010).

See the International Campaign on Climate Refugees' Rights Demanded New Legal Institutional Framework at Durban UN Talks, 6 December 2011, on http://www.voicebd.org/node/354 [accessed 8 December 2011].

See the (now defunct) website http://www.each-for.eu/index.php?module=main and Warner 2010.

See http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/activities/by-theme/lang/en

For instance, the ‘Research Workshop on Migration and the Environment: Developing a Global Research Agenda’ on 16–18 April 2008 in Munich, Germany, organised by the OIM, the UNU-EHS, the MunichRe Foundation, the UNEP, and the Rockefeller Foundation; the ‘International Conference on Environment, Forced Migration and Social Vulnerability’ organised in Bonn, Germany, on 9–11 October 2008 by the UNU-EHS; and the second ‘Expert Workshop on Climate Change, Environment, and Migration’ in Munich on 23–24 July 2009.

For instance, the ‘Conference on Climate Change, Environmental Degradation and Migration: Addressing Vulnerabilities and Harnessing Opportunities’ on 19 February 2008 in Geneva, organised by the Human Security Network, the OIM and the Greek Government; the ‘Climate Change and Forced Migration Conference’ at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London on 28 March 2008; and the CCEMA Expert Panel on ‘Emerging Policy Perspectives on Human Mobility in a Changing Climate’ in New York at the Simon Wiesenthal Center on 24 September 2009.

For instance, the seminar on ‘Climate Change, Environmental Degradation and Migration: Preparing for the Future’, organised jointly with the IOM, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the MacArthur Foundation, held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on 9 May 2008 by the UNITAR (UN Institute for training and research); or the seminar on ‘Environmentally Induced Migration and Climate Change’, also organised at the UNITAR on 20 April 2010.

For instance, a side-event titled ‘Climate Change, Migration and Forced Displacement: The New Humanitarian Frontier?’ at the COP 14 in Poznan on 8 December 2008 with contributions from the UNHCR, the UNU-EHS, the UNFPA, UN-HABITAT, etc.; the side-event on ‘Climate Adaptation Continuum, Migration and Displacement: Copenhagen and Beyond’, organised by the OIM, the UNHCR, and the UNU-EHS at the COP 15 in Copenhagen on 16 December 2009; and an intervention by William Lacy Swing, the Director General of the IOM, during a joint high-level segment of the sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 16) and of the sixth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 6) in Cancun on 10 December 2010. The IOM's Director General also intervened at COP 17/CMP 7 in Durban on 9 December 2011.

A search (made on 22 July 2011) in the LexisNexis database of international press in English found 164 occurrences of the keywords ‘climate migration’, ‘climate migrants’, or ‘climate migrant’ for 2001–2009, 162 for 2009, and 105 for 2010–2011. The same search for ‘climate refugees’ or ‘climate refugee’ returned, respectively, 810, 582, and 263 occurrences. Whereas ‘climate refugees’ still appears to be the concept commonly used in the press, its use is decreasing relative to that of ‘climate migration’. It was about five times more likely to be used in 2001–2009, whereas it was used ‘only’ two-and-a-half times more often in 2010–2011.

Note that I am not convinced by Chandler's use of the concept of ‘post-liberal’ governance to label these phenomena. It is my understanding that this post-liberal framework is actually a tendency of neoliberalisation processes (for a similar position, see Roberts 2010). This is due to the fact that Chandler wrote from a non-Marxist perspective and understood liberalism as a form of rights-based government (thus implicitly accepting the split between the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’) and not a form of capitalist social relations.

Let us also mention the fact that international organisations are subjected to neoliberal constraints such as the structural reduction of their financial allocation through national states. This forces them to engage in various forms of fund-raising, competing with each other to ensure their financial basis. In this regard, it seems that climate change and even climate migration are lucrative fields, and some international organisations may want to reframe their actions within these paradigms to draw attention and money to them (Hall 2010). This is partly due to the fact that some intergovernmental agencies ‘seem to function almost like private enterprises’ (Geiger and Pécoud 2010: 5). Furthermore, the discursive production of knowledge and normative perspectives on climate migration is itself produced through more or less formal groupings, organisations, or coalitions, capturing the neoliberal institutional mood. The CCEMA referred to above is exemplar of these public-private expert partnerships involving NGOs, international organisations, and the private sector.

A UNDP background paper recognised some possible drawbacks in the promotion of climate migration as a development strategy when it stated that ‘there is a dilemma here. Relaxing immigration rules as part of a concerted policy to ‘release the population pressure’ in areas affected by climate change could accelerate the brain drain of talented individuals from the developing world to the developed – and worsen the ‘hollowing out’ of affected economies, which is itself a driver of migration' (Brown 2007: 27).

Note that such a neoliberal subjectivity is not confined to the promotion of ‘migration as adaptation’ but entails a much broader vision of social relations and of social policies. A telling example of this is the promotion of forms of ‘social security’ that are actually purely market-based insurance mechanisms (e.g., Foresight 2011: 143–4; cf. the Asian Development Bank (2011: 6), the proposition to ‘nurture a market for private risk insurance supporting adaptation’). These market mechanisms are also thought to build the resilience of the population in the face of environmental degradation.

This move is also founded on a contestable social ontology associated with the concept of social capital (e.g., Adger 2010: 285–6). Social capital also figures in other policy documents such as Barnett and Webber (2010), Foresight (2011), etc. For a critique, see Fine (2010). For a critique of the contemporary uses of the notion of vulnerability, see Thomas (2010).

Note that these interventions can take advantage of disastrous conditions in southern countries, as was made clear in the following statement from the IOM: ‘Capacity building often requires long-term engagement vis-a-vis beneficiaries to develop a relationship of trust and effectively reform institutions. It is worth noting that a window of opportunity usually opens after a disaster, when authorities and communities are both more receptive to investment in disaster preparedness, DRM [disaster risk management] and CBDRM [community-based disaster risk management]’ (IOM 2009b: 59).

It is a loose class perspective in the sense that it recognises conflicting interests broadly related to relations of production within contemporary society and takes the side of one of these interests. This class perspective, however, does not appear directly but is deflected in the opposition between northern and southern states.