This book has told as complete as possible a story of mainstream policy making on migration and climate change between the Cancun negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2010 and its 2018 Conference of the Parties (COP) in Katowice. On the one hand, the book serves as a reference tool, detailing the main happenings during this time (see Part I), focusing on the Paris COP21 in extra detail in a stand-alone chapter (Chapter 3). On the other hand, the book works with critique to offer an analysis of policy making on migration and climate change that calls some of the very foundations of policy making in the area into question and pushes us to move beyond existing boundaries of the thinkable (Part II). The level of detail on policy making included in the first part of this book, as well as the overarching critical theoretical approach, set this volume apart from other recent book-length contributions to the literature that have addressed policy and governance on migration and climate change. Important contributions have been made on mandate change in selected organisations that have integrated the climate change and migration nexus into their work (Hall, 2016) and whether IGOs are expanding as a result (Simonelli, 2016), as well as on the prospects of a series of narratives on migration and climate change to influence global governance (Mayer, 2016b). The contribution contained within these pages aims to complement such volumes by providing a fresh perspective on the policy-making process, exploring its emergence and how different aspects of its genealogy influence how policy is being made on migration and climate change today.

Each half of the book has a distinct argument running through its core. The first half argues that migration and climate change has come of age as an area of policy making, having undergone many changes since the Cancun Adaptation Framework was thrashed out in 2010. The second half deconstructs a series of boundary-marking processes that are creating the ‘phenomenon’ of the migration and climate change nexus and influencing the policies emerging as possible responses. In the following two sections, this chapter will pull these arguments together, before turning to the future, extrapolating what the arguments made in this book could mean for future work on the migration and climate change nexus.