Patrick SakdapolrakUniversity of Vienna | UniWien · Institut für Geographie und Regionalforschung
Patrick Sakdapolrak
PhD
About
121
Publications
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Introduction
My research is concerned with the question of how vulnerable groups live with risk. I am particularly interested in how people cope with and adapt to environmental and social stresses. I worked on the conceptual development of social vulnerability (Sakdapolrak 2010), livelihoods (Sakdapolrak 2014) and social resilience (Keck & Sakdapolrak 2013) approaches, and applied it in research on health, migration and human-environemntal relations. I worked empirically in Thailand, India as well as Kenya.
Additional affiliations
October 2013 - present
Publications
Publications (121)
The loss of habitable land is increasingly recognized in climate risk assessments, mainly stemming from material approaches based on concepts of loss and damage. While this generalizes people’s experience of environmental change and habitability, the lived realities of environmental change impacts are not homogeneous within one place. Adaptation me...
In recognition of the complex and context-specific interplay between environmental change and human mobility, regionally focused systematic reviews have been acknowledged as very valuable. No such review exists for Southeast Asia (SEA), despite being a region that is significantly shaped by human mobility and a hotspot of environmental change. In t...
Environmental change is increasingly challenging the habitability of places around the world, particularly with regard to resource-dependent rural areas in the Global South. Apart from objectively measurable, bio-physical indices, it is likewise important to look at individual and group-specific perceptions of habitability, which are embedded in th...
There is growing recognition of the potential of migration to contribute to climate-change adaptation. Yet, there is limited evidence to what degree, under what conditions, for whom, and with which limitations this is effectively the case. We argue that this results from a lack of recognition and systematic incorporation of sociospatiality—the nest...
Migration is not a state of emergency, but a basic existential experience of humanity. It shapes contemporary societies by challenging established orders, creating transnational spaces beyond national hegemonies, creating new economies, influencing urban and communal ways of life, making inequality and precariousness visible locally and globally. M...
Regional economic resilience (RER) remains the state-of-the-art concept in economic geography to investigate regional development in times of disturbance. We seek to contribute to a transformative notion of RER, which unfolds in light of global environmental change. In our review of conceptual and empirical RER applications, we reveal three unresol...
Food security has continued to be a global concern despite progress in the international agenda to reduce food insecurity over the last decades. A considerable number of populations are facing difficulties in dealing with hunger globally. Ethiopia is among the countries that face persistent challenges to achieving food security. However, the subjec...
2023). Impeded migration as adaptation: COVID-19 and its implications for translocal strategies of environmental risk management. Advances in Southeast Asian Studies, 16(1), 157-169. In the debates over environmental impacts on migration, migration as adaptation has been acknowledged as a potential risk management strategy based on risk spreading a...
The role of migration as one potential adaptation to climate change is increasingly recognized, but little is known about whether migration constitutes successful adaptation, under what conditions, and for whom. Based on a review of emerging migration science, we propose that migration is a successful adaptation to climate change if it increases we...
Migration can strengthen adaptation to climate change. The potential of migration-as-adaptation builds on a world of intensifying global mobility and global connectedness and the increasing possibility of geographically spreading risks. But what if mobility is impeded and connectivity disrupted? And what happens if geographically distant places fac...
Forest decline and degradation are particularly high in the tropics and pose a risk to those who depend on forest resources. The in-migration of smallholders to forest frontiers can fuel transitions of livelihoods and land and resource use. However, the conditions under which in-migration contributes to such transitions remain poorly understood. Wi...
Food insecurity continues to be a major international concern aggravated by the economic crisis, pandemics, violent conflicts and war. In the past decade, scholars have highlighted the role of migration in household food security, yet the interrelationships between migration and food security have shown disconnections in the literature. This study...
Migration-information campaigns informing potential migrants about the risks of the journey and the harsh life conditions in the destination countries have emerged as prominent tools of migration management in the last decades. Despite their growing importance, little is known about their local implementation in countries of transit and origin as w...
Recent research on agricultural innovation has outlined social networks’ role in diff using agricultural knowledge; however, so far, it has broadly neglected the socio-spatial dimensions of innovation processes. Against this backdrop, we apply a spatially explicit translocal network perspective in order to investigate the role of migration-related...
The article “Do translocal networks matter for agricultural innovation? A case study on advice sharing in small scale farming communities in Northeast Thailand”, written by Till Rockenbauch, Patrick Sakdapolrak and Harald Sterly, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 10 April 2019 wit...
The relation between health and development is complex and interdependent. Concepts for an- alyzing it come from geographies of health and development studies. In the last 15 years seven fields were of special relevance: the three strands of health geography, research based on de- velopment theories or addressed issues related to urban health WASH...
It is expected that diseases are likely to spread to newer areas, and high-income countries may experience some illnesses that may have been restricted to low or middle-income countries. In addition, following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the present study noted that climate change is likely to have many effects on the spatial and...
This study seeks to provide a critical overview of the existing evidence on extreme climate events and the adaptation options of the affected population in order to help scholars navigate the field. The study examined the recent extreme climate events that occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the climate change adaptation options mentioned in the...
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• zwischen umweltdeterministischen, technikdeterministischen und alternativen Erklärungsansätzen für den Zusammenhang von Umwelt und Bevölkerung unterscheiden und
• Aussagen über den Zusammenhang zwischen Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Umwelt(-problemen) bewerten und in das im erste...
Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to...
In the past few years, governmental agencies have developed a diverse repertoire of migration-management measures to steer migration flows and discipline unwanted migration. Migration-information campaigns have become a prominent tool aimed at communicating directly to migration aspirations of the targeted population in transit and sending countrie...
In the past decades, migration and translocal forms of living, including the spatial separation of households and families, have become everyday reality for almost a billion people. At the same time, mobile information and communication technologies, and especially mobile phones, have spread rapidly and are now accessible for many, even in poorer c...
In the debate on the environmental impacts on migration, migration as adaptation has been acknowledged as a potential risk management strategy, based on risk spreading and mutual insurance of people living spatially apart: migrants and family members that are left behind stay connected through a combination of financial and social remittances, join...
Social resilience becomes particularly apparent in difficult times. In many rural regions people face multiple insecurities ranging from environmental change to losses of income and social conflicts. In such situations people often see migration as a path towards a better life – but is migration always the best solution or is it creating new challe...
Remittances play a central role in debates on migration and development as well as migration as adaptation to climate change. We seek to contribute to the growing body of literature that addresses the role of gender relations for remittance sending and usage. Based on multisited qualitative research on rural–urban migration in Thailand, we apply th...
Southeast Asian countries host significant numbers of forcibly displaced populations, both within countries and across borders. This brief review paper provides a basic overview on recent forced migration research in Southeast Asia for the period 2013 to 2018. To this end, a keyword search with two predefined sets of search terms was carried out in...
Recent research on agricultural innovation has outlined social networks’ role in diffusing agricultural knowledge; however, so far, it has broadly neglected the socio-spatial dimensions of innovation processes. Against this backdrop, we apply a spatially explicit translocal network perspective in order to investigate the role of migration-related t...
The article Do translocal networks matter for agricultural innovation? A case study on advice sharing in small scale farming communities in Northeast Thailand, written by Till Rockenbauch, Patrick Sakdapolrak and Harald Sterly, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 10 April 2019 witho...
Climate change adaptation (CCA) ‘barriers’ are frequently seen as responses to biophysical climate impacts, and thus defined as ‘obstacles’ to be ‘overcome’, rendered into categories of the techno‐managerial. However, barriers are often undertheorized and are blind to explanations of their origins or the causal mechanisms by which they operate. Thi...
Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.
Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.
In recent years there has been a renewed enthusiasm about the role of migration in development, as well as the importance of remittances. However, there is also a danger of rehashing previous debates with an overemphasis on economic remittances, while relegating the transfer of social remittances, such as new ideas, knowledge, skills, practices, an...
Livelihood studies have highlighted social support networks as critical sources of social capital and as an important feature of rural households' resilience, however so far, have contributed little the understanding of network capital's socio-spatial patterns. Accordingly, livelihood studies have tended to omit relevant determinants of rural house...
Secondary or onward mobility of refugees can pose considerable challenges for targeted and timely humanitarian assistance, and for long-term integration. There is very little systematic knowledge of the onward migration of refugees after their initial flight to a country of reception in general, and specifically in Turkey. In this chapter, we descr...
Background: Despite an increase in scholarly and policy interest regarding the impacts of environmental change on migration, empirical knowledge in the field remains varied, patchy, and limited. Generalised discourse on environmental migration frequently oversimplifies the complex channels through which environmental change influences the migration...
Despite an increase in scholarly and policy interest regarding the impacts of
environmental change on migration, empirical knowledge in the field remains varied,
patchy, and limited. Generalized discourse on environmental migration frequently
oversimplifies the complex channels through which environmental change influences
the migration process.Thi...
There is only little systematic knowledge on the onward migration of refugees after their arrival in countries of reception. Onward mobility is a challenge for effective humanitarian assistance (such as shelter, food or health) and long-term social and economic integration of refugees. We analysed an anonymised CDR dataset of ~50.000 Türk Telekom us...
Secondary or onward mobility of refugees can pose considerable challenges for targeted and timely humanitarian assistance, and for long-term integration. There is very little systematic knowledge on the onward migration of refugees after their initial flight to a country of reception in general, and specifically in Turkey. In the paper we describe...
The current issue of ASEAS, 11(2), discusses the highly relevant topic of forced migration in Southeast Asia. Historically, the region is known for the so called boat people crisis in the aftermath of the Vietnam War between 1975 and mid 1995, when almost 800,000 Vietnamese fled their country by sea in fear of prosecution. Currently, Southeast Asia...
Currently two strands of research on migration are producing seemingly conflicting narratives on migration and its impact: one emphasizes potentiality while the other one highlights its link with precarity. Publications addressing the developmental impact of migration and its role for climate-change adaptation often portray migrants as agents of ch...
Secondary, or onward mobility of refugees can pose considerable challenges for targeted and timely humanitarian assistance, and for long-term integration, in addition to often violating regulations. There is very little systematic knowledge on the onward migration of refugees in general, and specifically in Turkey. In the paper we describe how the...
This paper explores the mobilities and structural moorings of Thai labour migrants in Singapore from a translocal perspective. We argue that combining the mobilities paradigm with the concept of translocality offers a fruitful avenue of investigation not only of the production of translocal spaces, but also of their temporality and mutability. Thro...
Through different forms of migration, rural societies are increasingly connected beyond community boundaries. Mobility and connectedness are so common in most rural areas that they should not be overlooked, nor should they be seen as exclusively problematic. Thus it is important to understand what influence migration has on the local context of com...
The Central Dry Zone covers about 13 % of Myanmar and is home to nearly a third of the total population of 52 million. The majority of households depend on agriculture-based income (83 %). Besides low profitability, poor diversification, and high reliance on credit, these agricultural households are subject to additional stress by soil degradation,...
In recent decades, there has been a shift in the climate-migration discourse: from one preoccupied with ‘climate refugees’ to one of ‘migration as adaptation’. Academics and policy-makers alike see migration as a way to generate income, diversify livelihoods, and spread risk in the face of climate change. Past literature has found that policy presc...
In a globalized world, the complexity of mobility prompts varied approaches to conceptualize connections across social and spatial boundaries. Over the past decade an increasing number of scholars have elaborated translocality as an approach to comprehend embeddedness while being mobile. Scale is one core dimension in conceptualizations of transloc...
In the last decades, a growing scholarship has outlined the crucial role of social networks as a source of resilience. However, with regard to the Global South, the role of social networks for the resilience of rural communities remains an under-researched and underconceptualized issue, because research remains scattered between different strands a...
“The space of vulnerability” – the title of the influential paper by Michael Watts and Hans-Georg Bohle from 1993 – highlights the importance of spatiality for vulnerability research. As geographers have fundamentally shaped the concept of vulnerability, the issue of spatiality has been crucial for vulnerability from the outset. However, what notio...
In the past 30 years the concept of vulnerability has been an important paradigm in human geography and development studies. Vulnerability analyses have significantly enhanced our understanding of everyday life under conditions of poverty and food insecurity in the Global South and of people’s capacities to live with risks and natural hazards. A vu...
Climate change and migration issues have recently gained traction in science and policy debates, especially as they relate to issues of national security. This article argues that this type of framing often suffers from a one-dimensional focus on the negative effects of climate change-induced migration, including mass movements across borders and c...
The poster gives an overview over the conceptual framework and interim results of the transdisciplinary research project ”TransRe - Building Resilience to Climate Change through Migration and Translocality”.
Umweltbezogene gesellschaftliche Probleme sind im 21. Jahrhundert drängender denn je. Im „Anthropozän“ beeinflussen menschliche Eingriffe die natürliche Umwelt in einem Maße, wie dies noch niemals in der Vergangenheit der Fall war. Der menschgemachte Klimawandel mit seinen vielfältigen Folgen ist hier ein prominentes Beispiel. Doch auch auf vielen...
Climate change and migration are drawing increasing interest from researchers and policy makers as well as from the general public. While in the beginning a simplistic and geo-deterministic comprehension of the environmental impact on human mobility had dominated the discussion, the framing of the relationship has recently become more differentiate...
This article analyses the dynamics between rainfall variability, food insecurity and human mobility in eight case studies, namely Ghana, Tanzania, Guatemala, Peru, Bangladesh, India, Thailand and Vietnam. It covers a large spectrum of rainfall-related climatic events, including floods, drought, seasonal shifts and dry spells, and their impact on fo...
The relationship between climate change and migration is much more subtle and complex than 'clickbait' headlines suggest, write Kayly Ober and Patrick Sakdapolrak A family in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. Leaders from vulnerable island states have rejected the 'climate refugee' label, and instead emphasise the 'resilience' of their peop...
Research into the relationship between environment and migration—particularly how the environment influences the decision to migrate—has gained currency in the last decade. However, the growing body of recent environmental-migration literature exhibits an under-theorized and depoliticized notion of the environment. Furthermore, migration is usually...
In the space of a few short years, the UNFCCC process has given birth to a new policy regime, the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage, to prepare for the adverse consequences of climate change to vulnerable societies. The justification for this policy is that a residual domain exists wherein climate change adaptation, disaster risk re...
Talking about migration and human environment relations in times of globalization and climate change is a highly relevant but also difficult venture. The debate usually takes place in a blurred field between science, media and politics. The tug of war between alarmists and sceptics has dominated the scientific debate. Whereas the alarmists try to s...
The 2013 general elections in Kenya entailed no recurrence of the 2007-08 post-election violence. Closer examination at the local level, though, indicates that the experiences of violence continue to influence the social sphere. Divisions between a long-established population and newcomers are blatant especially at places with high levels of immigr...
The 2013 general elections in Kenya entailed no recurrence of the 2007-08 post-election violence. Closer examination at the local level, though, indicates that the experiences of violence continue to influence the social sphere. Divisions between a long-established population and newcomers are blatant especially at places with high levels of immigr...
The persisting problem of poverty in the global south has since the 1990’s been increasingly analysed and tackled from the perspective of the poor themselves. The shift of view point from a structurally oriented perspective to a more actor-oriented view was closely related with the concept of livelihoods, which put strong emphasis on people-centere...
One relatively novel way of assessing the characteristics and limitations of R&V is undertaken in this article by investigating a growing alternative paradigm—Loss and Damage (L&D) policy. The idea of L&D as an emerging policy may be surprising to many in the disaster risk management community, and so we first outline the origins of this trend, and...
Die Geographische Entwicklungsforschung (GEF) beschäftigt sich mit der Entstehung und den Folgen sowie den räumlichen Dimensionen von gesellschaftlicher Entwicklung und sozialer Ungleichheit im Kontext der Globalisierung. Sowohl konzeptionelle Beiträge als auch empirische Arbeiten in der GEF orientieren sich an aktuellen sozialwissenschaftlichen Tr...
The employment of translocality as a research perspective is currently gaining momentum. A growing number of scholars from different research traditions concerned with the dynamics of mobility, migration and socio-spatial interconnectedness have developed conceptual approaches to the term. They usually build on insights from transnationalism, while...
Over the last decade, a growing body of literature has emerged which is concerned with the question of what form a promising concept of social resilience might take. In this article we argue that social resilience has the potential to be crafted into a coherent analytic framework that can build on scientific knowledge from the established concept o...
According to a recent WHO report around 100 million people are reduced to poverty every year due to costs associated with illness. Contributing to the growing literature on the economic burden of illness, this article examines the indirect and direct costs of illness that occurs on household level, describes its influence on treatment seeking behav...
This paper examines the relationship between rainfall-related events and trends, livelihood and food security and migration in rural upland communities in Thailand. The study was conducted as one of eight case studies within the framework of the “Where the Rain Falls” Project. The paper is based on empirical research in four villages in the Provinc...
Twelve years after the discussions on development and institutions at the meeting of the Geographischer Arbeitskreis Entwicklungstheorien (GAF, 2000) in Zurich, this paper seeks to put institutions back on the research agenda in development geography. The authors explore recent trends in institutional theory and propose a dialectic understanding of...
Delhi’s slums face recurrent and disturbing waste water-related problems: overflowing drains, stagnation of sewerage near or within houses, and subsequent mosquito breeding cause difficulties for everyday life and serious health hazards. The question arises for the affected people as well as administration, how to deal with this tremendous challeng...
The nexus between migration dynamics and environmental change has drawn the attention of many researchers in the recent past. While the majority of studies focus on the impact of the environment on migration decisions, less emphasis has been placed on the feedback effect of migration on the environment in rural sending areas. This article provides...