Deconstructing climate change and migration narratives in the Indian Ocean World

Introduction

Across the Indian Ocean littoral migration is a lived reality and predates the arrival of colonial powers and indentured labor regimes. People have always moved for employment and marriage, to avoid conflict, meet personal aspirations and to access opportunities (Thumbe, 2018). In this issue, we consider an emerging form of mobility that has been linked to the expanding impact of climate change. Even though the twin challenges of human migration and climate change are polarized thematic areas (IPCC, 2014), these have undeniably piqued curiosity among scientific research communities and academia and stimulated advocacy among civil society organizations and policy circles over the last two decades. While having made progress on ‘loss and damage’ on account of increased evidence from around the world, framing the issue between developed and developing nations and the matter of obligation have led to conflicting opinions and interests (European Parliamentary Research Service, 2022) even as migrant and displaced populations are steadily on the rise globally. At the 27th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP27), countries, after considerable deliberations, agreed to set up a compensation fund for vulnerable nations undergoing loss and damage from climate-induced disasters (UN, 2022). On the other hand, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) has agreed on twenty-three non-binding objectives and migration management across all levels in the respective countries (Gisselquist & Tarp, 2019). Yet, gaps remain in drawing policies that can protect environmental migrants (and), refugees (given the legal constraints on the latter), and displaced populations (Zetter, 2017).

Scholars have focused on the need to turn to loss and damage in vulnerable economies (Warner & Van der Geest, 2013). Varied dimensions of loss and damage have been assessed, such as new research methods (Gall, 2015), social justice and equity (Huggel, Wallimann-Helmer, Stone, & Cramer, 2016), governance and policy-related considerations (Page & Heyward, 2017), and even legal perspectives (Wewerinke-Singh 2018). In particular, non-economic losses such as the loss of ecosystems and indigenous knowledge and the eventual cultural and social decline accompanying such losses are some of the key issues that have emerged to be of fundamental concern. Referring to a study by Stiglitz et al. (2009), we can observe that a vast difference persists in the well-being of migrants (see also IOM, 2013); those moving between developing countries have the least in terms of overall well-being, while South-South migrants face major hurdles and struggle upon their arrival in destination countries (Melde et al., 2014). Thus, with the understanding that loss of livelihoods and ecosystems are complex, non-linear processes, and environment and society are inextricably linked (Renaud, Warner, & Bogardi, 2011), migration can and often becomes an inevitable outcome for most groups. However, one is mindful that first, in the case of environmentally induced migration decisions, nuanced data and research are imperatives for knowing the potential estimates of climate migrants. Second, combined factors, i.e., pre-existing levels of resilience, vulnerability, and multidimensional poverty, determine the extent to which environmental changes trigger movements (Martin et al., 2021) in forced, voluntary and other circumstances, and those who are displaced or are ill-equipped to move.

Further acknowledging earlier studies that predict environmental drivers of migration as a proximate factor in the phenomenon of human mobility (Piguet & Laczko, 2014), this special issue further delves into the resultant human immobilities that arise from both climatic and non-climatic factors, especially as environmental stress is enmeshed and interwoven with economic, political, cultural, and social processes (McLeman, 2019). With South-South migration having gained greater stimulus in migration studies over the years (Bartlett, 2012; Facchini, Mayda, & Mendola, 2013; Lee, 2010), we concur with scholars who emphasize the need for wider research on regional migration systems (Bakewell, Kubal, & Pereira, 2016), and attentiveness to improved policy and governance (Gisselquist & Tarp, 2019) in the Global South countries within the scope of their national, regional and local contexts. In this direction, our research interest in the Indian Ocean region is attributed to a number of reasons beyond what scholars working on transoceanic mobility have already engaged with at great length, i.e., remittance economy, indentured labor regimes, transregional migration and debates on cosmopolitanism (Amrith, 2013; Bose, 2006; Ho, 2017; Sheriff, 2010). We engage with the prevalence of intraregional and intra-subregional migration in Africa and India, which, as Lututala argues (2014), ‘reflects a context of poverty’. Moreover, the region and its littoral states are climate-volatile, with approximately 60 million people dependent on the blue economy and ‘living within 100 kilometers of a shoreline’.

The papers in this issue focus on cardinally important but less glimpsed dimensions of the internally displaced population and its ‘nexus’ with livelihood stresses that have been triggered by climate change-induced natural disasters, affecting community resilience, health and well-being in South Asia and Southern and Eastern Africa. Each paper appraises these challenges and constraints of how different types of migrants and displaced groups tackle livelihood risks, adapt to external shocks in situ scenarios, and sustain family ties with (or without) social remittances. In this direction, the papers contribute to the earlier studies which corroborate the Indian Ocean region’s vulnerabilities (Pelling & Uitto, 2001) while having explored human migration from the point of view of remittances as a coping mechanism, and remittance networks among (circular, returnee and other) migrants. ‘Environmental refugeehood’ and ‘climate-induced migration’ are emerging ideas within migration studies that are profoundly contested among academics and scholars working on migration issues. Environmental refugees are persons who have been forced to migrate or displaced out of their natural homes because of extreme weather events, such as flash floods, riverbank erosion, cyclones and failed monsoons, as well as human-induced development, such as through dam building. While not all people displaced by geophysical and biophysical disasters who cross international borders can be characterized as refugees, they can, at best, be described as ‘internally displaced populations’. The papers in this collective unpack the country-specific pathways of migration produced by climate change in South Asia and Southern and Eastern Africa through a comparative analysis that focuses on transboundary and interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as an in-depth review of the contemporary academic literature on these subjects. The relevance of this special issue thus lies in addressing three fundamental issues. First, we aim to explore marginalized topics within migration research – internal migration, which was, for a long time, out of the realm of mainstream migration discourse and requires greater attention (Thumbe, 2018). Second, we aim to examine the problem holistically, integrating ‘bottom-up’ participatory and ‘top-down’ policy perspectives by engaging with migrants’ perceptions as well as the visions of policymakers and the epistemic community working on climate change mitigation. The papers, therefore, focus on a niche area of migration discourse that looks at ‘environmental refugees’ – populations who have been internally displaced because of multiple socio-economic and socio-political factors, where climate change acts as a threat multiplier. Third, a review of the existing literature on the climate change refugee debate will pave the way for critical reflections on climate migrants in the Indian Ocean region.

While taking cognizance of the fact that ‘migration [also] occurs for reasons other than climate effects’ (McLeman, 2019), the papers in this issue contextually analyse regional and internal migration, mobility, and immobility within the region as it continues to witness a surge in migration and displacement. We reckon that each of the papers, through its respective study, will resolve knowledge gaps and strengthen the interlinkages between development and migration. Broadly, the papers will have enriched the current debates on the migration-development-climate change nexus and open newer avenues for research on the Global South and South-South migration studies relevant to policymakers, practitioners and academics. The collection of papers further establishes that adaptation to climate change through migration does not always lead to the intended outcomes and that it can exacerbate existing socio-political and economic vulnerabilities and consequently lead to maladaptation. Relatedly, it will be a misnomer to pin down all coastal mobilities to climate change. As studies have illustrated (Dewan, 2022 and 2023), climate change is used as a ‘trope’ to attract global funding by policy actors, activists, think tanks and NGOs in the Global South. However, researchers tend to lose sight of the nuances of migration that are entrenched within structural violence produced by class-caste inequality, poverty, gendered roles, patriarchal norms, predatory capitalism and even kinship networks (Matthan, 2022; Paprocki, 2022).

My ethnographic fieldwork experience in the Sundarbans delta appraises some of the issues. I first visited the delta during 2012–13, and during my stay in Dayapur village, located in the South 24 Parganas, I met a poet by the name of Mukunda Gayen. He became my host, friend and chief interlocutor. Through his assistance, I organized interviews, took photographs and conducted participant observations in neighboring villages to generate ethnographic data on the motivation behind human mobility in the littoral. Upon my arrival, he and his son were quick to show the mark of flood water that inundated their village and his mud house that destroyed most of his priceless, handwritten literary work (see images 1 and 2). Gayen was also deprived of the Aila cyclone relief fund for rebuilding his lost home by the district administration, as he was disengaged from the village-level patron-client politics of the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist). However, he did not migrate despite the hardships in the aftermath of the cyclone. He sustained his family by selling life insurance policies and continued with his creative literary engagements. For him and many people in Dayapur, climate change is real but not the sole trigger for migration despite the devastating impacts. Post-Aila, the region has witnessed more severe cyclones that many residents link to the changing climate. On the other hand, his two sons have permanently out-migrated. One son works in a shoe factory in Kolkata, while the other son works as a schoolteacher away from the delta. Mukunda had to sell a portion of his ancestral land to support the education of his children. The third son is employed in the village as a constable at the local police station, which gives him and his family a sense of economic security from the vagaries of seasonal work provided by agriculture, now threatened by precarious weather events.¹

This vignette reveals economic and aspirational push factors as significant determinants for staying, as well as for moving, which are not always attributed to climate change-induced disasters. In other cases, temporary emplacement of households to cyclone shelters and flood relief camps has pushed farmers and landless laborers to look for seasonal and temporary work outside the delta. Economic factors, better livelihood opportunities outside the village and people’s aspiration for white-collar jobs to escape the drudgery of village life have been instrumental in determining who migrates and why. Mukunda’s sons migrated with little economic prospects in the village besides the tilling of the land. Younger generations refrain from physical labor and prefer work that carries dignity and may be deemed respectable. The uncertainties of monsoon, perched water tables, and increasing salinity levels accompanied by the disproportionate use of fertilizers and pesticides have destroyed the potential for a successful agricultural practice, which pushes individuals to pursue vocational training and footloose manual labor jobs in cities. Climate change risk poses limited and slow motivation for people to move out of their natal home permanently, although it does trigger temporary mobility. Further, age and gender were found to be crucial determinants in my study to understand who can and cannot migrate from disaster-affected landscapes in the Bay of Bengal littoral. While climate is, in fact, a threat multiplier, it cannot be seen in isolation as the sole trigger for human mobility.

Late Poet Mukunda Gayen pointing to the 2009 Aila cyclone flood-water level in his mud house, Dayapur Village, Sundarbans Coastal (Photo Credit, Debojyoti Das)

Pradosh Gayne pointing to the 2009 Aila cyclone water level inside his mud house (Photo credit: Debojyoti Das)

From the broader understanding that migrants in developing countries predominantly move internally or within their countries, the papers in this edition turn to the complexities of migration processes within the subregions of South Asia and East Africa. It is necessary to assess the ways in which environmental refugees in littoral societies and urban agglomerations in India, Tanzania, and Uganda use and enhance their individual and collective agency to devise new survival strategies in the context of endangered livelihoods. Given that climate change will have different impacts on men and women, it is equally significant to capture gendered narratives by critically examining adaptation frameworks that have often lacked a gender-sensitive approach (Maluka, 2013).

The papers of Makwa and Makulilo engage with this theme conjointly by offering phenomenological and decolonial Global South perspectives focusing on case studies in the Dar es Salaam municipality, Tanzania, and the Bududa District and Bunambutye Settlement in eastern Uganda. Makwa’s paper delves into the songs of women landslide survivors in these two settings (Bududa, the place of displacement, and Bunambutye, the place where some of these survivors are resettled) to show how forms of art (music/songs) act as repositories for women to generate knowledge that can be harnessed by stakeholders, including government agencies and NGOs to reduce the human impact of landslide disasters in Uganda. Makwa argues that for Ugandan authorities to holistically mitigate the landslide disaster, there is an imminent need to consider views presented by different people, including women, as well as what is communicated through local folk songs and music. Makwa, therefore, explores, through a ‘cultural lens’, the creative use of lore by displaced migrant women as a response to mitigate (or possibly even cope with) environmental change. Makulilo’s paper, on the other hand, focuses on the gendered impact of migration in peri-urban settlements in Dar es Salaam municipality and assesses the gendered experiences of environmental/climate refugees in relative poverty. Sengar’s paper presents a historical narrative of migration from the eastern Indian coast (West Bengal) to Western India (Bay of Bengal to Arabian Sea littoral) in Aurangabad city, Maharashtra. Sengar traces the migration trajectory of people to the Western Indian Ocean engaged in urban (informal) labor. The author observes that the movement route continues to be a historical remnant from the (pre) colonial past and situates communities’ experiences of social divisiveness, resource-induced conflicts and internal migration and displacement in an ecologically sensitive context in the coastal belts and their hinterlands, where people in the last decades have been in a state of dispossession as climate migrants and refugees. Acknowledging that ‘perceptions of risk’ (Ruhlemann & Jordan, 2021) can play out in myriad ways in the face of climate threats, the thematic issue extends to a more non-figurative realm of culture among individuals in a community. Adaptation is not always ‘movement’ for economic prospects; it can, in fact, also mean staying put to build resilience. Along the way, vulnerable people can use creative means as a part of their agency.

From the available literature on climate migration security, we speculate that migration, when seen through the security lens, can create ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of movements and im-mobilities and also the reverse. For instance, the climate-fueled conflict in the recent past along the Bay of Bengal coastline (Reuters, 2022) led to people being displaced amid conflicts that aggravated the ‘geopolitics of fear’ (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2010) and ‘geopolitics of violence’ (Parenti, 2011). The ‘Othering’ process of climate migrants is part of the ‘climate crisis management’ well within the purview of government interventions that can choose and pick between what can be defined as adaptation and maladaptation. In the process, governability can create systemic opportunities for resilience-building for communities or degenerate systems, which may or may not have been better earlier. Mazigo’s paper (in this issue) locates this theme of governability, offering a region-specific understanding of migration in Dar-es-Salaam from a governance lens. In turn, it can create opportunities for and to secure migrants. As migration and climate studies increasingly focus on micro-level research on immobilities and households’ migration decisions, we find the Sundarbans in West Bengal, India, a critical site. The paper by Das and Basu complements these perspectives by critically engaging with the ongoing debates on climate change-driven (internal) migration and non-climatic drivers for population mobility and compares scenarios of displacement in South Asia and East Africa.

While there is an increasing body of research focused on climate change-related migration, there is not yet adequate research on how environmental refugees overcome their ‘vulnerability’ and enhance their individual and collective agency to successfully deal with climate, health and livelihood challenges in their ‘new’ socio-economic and political settings (Black, Bennett, Thomas, & Beddington, 2011; Hunter & Norton, 2015; McLeman & Gemenne, 2018). Displacement dynamics related to climate change are complex. Problematizing the phenomena requires us to distinguish between causes and correlations and to engage with interactions between climate change and mobility on the one hand and their nexuses with the political economy of resource use, structural violence and (under)development on the other hand. Unpacking these nexuses also motivates us to pay particular attention to the temporal dimensions of both movement and climate change impacts. More specially, making sense of climate change-related human mobility requires us to distinguish the effects of slow-onset climate change impacts from those of rapid-onset disasters, as both act as drivers of temporary, seasonal, long-term, permanent and/or protracted displacement. From a protection standpoint, taken together, these intersections pose acute and timely questions for the livelihoods and human rights of impacted individuals and communities.

In climate change research, migration is often portrayed as an adaptation strategy – meaning that those with resources and networks can move out of risk-prone regions altogether or at least spatially diversify their livelihoods. Migration, as such, is therefore considered a successful mechanism for dealing with climate change. However, the climate refugee discourse views migration as the last resort of the most vulnerable, identifying migrants as those most exposed to climate change and those with a reduced capacity to adapt to risk. In our work across South Asia and East Africa, we found that such dualistic views of migration do not fully realize the breadth of migrant experiences in the real world. In addition, the authors contributing to the special issue voice the importance of collaborative, transregional and multi-sited research in the Indian Ocean littoral region. Internal migration within a country/region has been equally significant in bringing about transformative changes in society, as compared to transoceanic migration in the Indian Ocean region.

Therefore, the aim of the special issue is to reflect on ethical collaboration and transboundary/transregional research involving not only academic institutions and scholarly networks but also government, policy and civil society actors and the ways paper contributors have engaged with their wider cohort of interlocuters, informants and co-workers. The collection of articles focuses both on the key debates encompassing the environmental refugee crisis in the Indian Ocean region and on the local narratives vis-à-vis global debates. The volume brings into focus the agency of the paper contributors who advance and develop Global South perspectives, which challenge the agendas of donors and funding agencies. These contributions will lay the groundwork for a broader discussion of the role of the social sciences and environmental humanities in filling research gaps and strengthening regional capacities to respond to the titanic challenges posed by climate change and the environmental refugee crisis.

We see the papers adding to the ongoing debate on environmental refugeehood in four distinct ways:

• Engaging with the idea of refugee agency, expressed through everyday struggles.

• Looking at the idea of ‘emplacement’ (Makwa, 2015) and employing a phenomenological approach to understand how people reimagine their lost landscapes in the new environment through storytelling, nostalgia, songs and memories of migration.

• Developing trans-regional case studies and collectively examining the experience of environmental refugees across countries in the Indian Ocean region.

• Providing an agential network through a governance perspective.

In recent debates on climate change and migration, the focus on the figure of ‘environmental refugees’ has given way to the broader conception of the ‘climate–migration’ nexus. The idea that migration can represent a legitimate adaptation strategy has emerged strongly (Black et al., 2011), and this appears to be a positive development. However, the political and normative implications of this evolution are still understudied. Our focus in the special issue, therefore, has been to draw on migrants’ choices that are conditioned by livelihood stresses, gender norms, kinship networks, class and caste differences, structural inequalities and the health and well-being of communities. All these aspects, individually and in tandem, play a role in the push and pull factors of migration and present a complex story that goes beyond the standard narrative of climate- or nature-induced migration (McLeman & Gemenne, 2018).

Situating the aforementioned themes within these contexts, the papers endeavor to incite newer directions and raise critical questions centered on climate-induced mobility/im-mobility within migration studies. Through evidence gathered from the authors’ long-term work in the region, the collection of papers will further establish that adaptation to climate change through migration does not always lead to desirable conditions. For instance, it exacerbates existing socio-political and economic vulnerabilities, undermines the livelihoods and well-being of the displaced population and often produces maladaptation. The collective focus of the papers in this special issue is to map migration beyond its theoretical definitions and conceptions as an affinitive, comparable and reciprocal process to internal and external exigencies. Aligned to the arguments and approaches of the literature put forth, the contributions to this special issue interrogate the within-country movements vis-à-vis immobilities and the structural enablers (and ‘non-enablers’) that decide these as such. The papers plot and unpack the country-specific pathways of climate-induced migration in Southern and Eastern Africa and South Asia from a transboundary and interdisciplinary perspective.

Convincingly, the papers in this special issue intend to provoke action and solidarity for populations in different conditions of vulnerabilities both from the context of climate change and non-climatic factors and from the point of socio-economic and socio-ecological characteristics. We gather that integrating safety and development into climate actions through relevant environmental policies is a matter of ethical responsibility and care. In this sense, we concur with what Degroot et al. (2021) have proposed – that one needs a rigorous understanding of societal response to climate change.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Richard Walz (Jonathan), Bashabi Frazer, Srija Basu, Swarupa Gupta, Gurpreet Goraya, Sanjay Chaturvedi and our SSRC colleagues for their valued feedback, amends and suggestions to develop the special issue introduction. Likewise, special appreciation goes to SSRC, US, for supporting the project and the Indian Ocean Collaboratory team during the COVID period.

Notes

1 These reflections are from my personal communication and interaction with the late poet Mukunda Gayne, with whom I lived and worked. I conducted fieldwork during 2012–13, 2016–17 and in August 2022, soon after the pandemic in the Sundarbans delta. I would like to thank the Social Science Research Council, US, for supporting my research through the InterAsia Junior Fellowship (2016–17). This publication was made possible by support from the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Melon Foundation.