Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- About the Author
- Series Preface
- Foreword
- 1 Migration and Climate Change: The Construction of a Nexus
- Part I Episodes of Policy Making on Migration and Climate Change 2010–18
- Part II Deconstructing Policy Making on Migration and Climate Change
- Notes
- References
- Index
6 - Struggles to Locate Mobile People at the Centre of the Migration and Climate Change Nexus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- About the Author
- Series Preface
- Foreword
- 1 Migration and Climate Change: The Construction of a Nexus
- Part I Episodes of Policy Making on Migration and Climate Change 2010–18
- Part II Deconstructing Policy Making on Migration and Climate Change
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
‘It's about people, like people, like the human face of climate change and they are not staying where they were expected to stay! And after that you can call them, I think however … like, from many different things, whether you want to emphasise whether they were forced to move or whether they decided to move. But the basic point remains that we are talking about individuals, people, and not just things.’ (IOM Interview 4, 2016)
The second nodal point in the policy-making discourse on migration and climate change is the people who are at the centre of the phenomenon analysed in Chapter 5 of this book. People are also central to this discourse, for without people whose mobilities are in some way being affected, the abstract phenomenon of the migration and climate change nexus would remain as such, an abstract phenomenon. However, this is not to say that an easily identifiable community of affected people exists or that the lives of those people who are perceived as being affected by the nexus can be slotted into existing systems for understanding and classifying people on the move. One commonality shared by the people at the centre of the migration and climate change nexus is the exceptionality that is created around them. To put it simply, they do not adhere to what is considered the norm or, to borrow from the quote at the opening of this chapter, “they are not staying where they were expected to stay!” (IOM Interview 4, 2016). The basis of this exceptionality being identified as movement reveals a sedentary bias underlying the conceptualisation of the migration and climate change nexus.
It demands that we view the migrant and the refugee as the ‘other’, the constitutive outside or excess of what is otherwise imagined as the pairing of ‘normal’ even if fraught geopolitical and climatic conditions. It reinforces the belief, erroneous in our view, that life internal to the modern nation state is settled, sedentary and at some degree of remove from the transnational flows of labour, capital and technology, imagined to lie beyond state borders. (Baldwin and Bettini, 2017: 3)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Negotiating Migration in the Context of Climate ChangeInternational Policy and Discourse, pp. 137 - 156Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019