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... The differentiated habitabilities result, among others from i) unequal ways in which people interact with place, resulting for example from different types of livelihoods (such as farmers or herders), or from unequal access to land with different properties and risk exposure), ii) the different degree to which changes of habitability affect people, depending on the social status and position of individuals and groups, and their endowment with material and immaterial resources; iii) unequal perception and conception of, and relation to or attachment to place, depending for example on unequal motility, mobility and access to (parts of) places, but also unequal participation in place-specific activities, processes, or rituals), iv) and unequal participation in discourses over the value and meaning of place, on future-making, and the positioning of self with regard to local society and place. Much like the intersectional understanding of vulnerabilities, an intersectional framing of the differences of habitability should go beyond singular "vulnerable groups" but look at intra-group heterogeneity, emphasize the scope of agency, and the mechanisms through which social categories are constructed and inequalities are maintained (Kaijser & Kronsell, 2014, Vigil, 2024. ...
As global climate change intensifies, the question of what makes a place habitable or uninhabitable is critical, particularly in the context of a potential future climate outside the realm of lived experience, and the possible concurrent redistribution of populations partly associated with such climatic shifts. The concept of habitability holds the potential for advancing the understanding of the societal consequences of climate change, as well as for integrating systemic understandings and rights-based approaches. However, most ways of analyzing habitability have shortcomings in terms of in-depth integration of socio-cultural aspects and human agency in shaping habitability, in failing to address spatial inequalities and power dynamics, and in an underemphasis of the connectedness of places. Here we elaborate habitability as an emergent property of the relations between people and a given place that results from people’s interactions with the material and immaterial properties of a place. From this, we identify four axes that are necessary to go beyond environmental changes, and to encompass socio-cultural, economic, and political dynamics: First the processes that influence habitability require a systemic approach, viewing habitability as an outcome of ecological, economic, and political processes. Second, the role of socio-cultural dimensions of habitability requires special consideration, given their own operational logics and functioning of social systems. Third, habitability is not the same for everyone, thus a comprehensive understanding of habitability requires an intersectionally differentiated view on social inequalities. Forth, the influence of external factors necessitates a spatially relational perspective on places in the context of their connections to distant places across scales. We identify key principles that should guide an equitable and responsible research agenda on habitability. Analysis should be based on disciplinary and methodological pluralism and the inclusion of local perspectives. Habitability action should integrate local perspectives with measures that go beyond purely subjective assessments. And habitability should consider the role of powerful actors, while staying engaged with ethical questions of who defines and enacts the future of any given place.
... Markers of inequality-such as gender, race, ethnicity, and national or territorial origin-manifest in access to resources and in climate decision-making processes. These reveal the importance of just transitions adopting a pluralistic and intersectional approach to prevent the reproduction of exclusionary dynamics [36,43]. ...
Although scholarly work on international migration overwhelmingly focuses on movements to the Global North, at least a third of all international migration takes place between the countries of the Global South and this migration is increasing. Introducing the aims and contributions to the Palgrave Handbook of South–South Migration and Inequality, this chapter provides an overview of the history, scale and significance of South–South migration as well as existing research on the relationships between migration and inequality. Scholarly work on South–South migration, we argue, is dominated by theories and concepts derived from the Global North, from where most migration research funding originates and where most migration researchers are based. This work often fails to fully grasp the complex social, as well as economic and political factors, associated with migration in the Global South, and the intersectional inequalities with which migration is associated. Centring the knowledge and perspectives of those living and working in the Global South is critical if we want to understand the relationships between South–South migration and inequality. It is also vital in order to harness the potential benefits of migration for development, and for the well-being of migrants and their families.
The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow-onset climate disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adap-tative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status quo, this paper brings together original and mixed-method data collected between 2020 and 2022 in Cambodia to critically examine the "green finance" agenda by highlighting the ways in which microfinance contributes to reproducing and exacerbating climate precarity and harm for many. We evidence how credit-taking can lead to more dangerous and individualised efforts to cope with, and adapt to, existing conditions at home, often at the cost of emotional and bodily depletion. By doing so, we contribute to answering calls for connecting literatures and thinking on social reproduction , depletion, and climate change adaptation.
The last few years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the concept of social tipping points (STPs), understood as nonlinear processes of transformative change in social systems. A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship has been focusing in particular on social tipping related to climate change. In contrast with tipping point studies in the natural sciences–for example climate tipping points and ecological regime shifts–STPs are often conceptualized as desirable, offering potential solutions to pressing problems. Drawing on a well‐established definition for tipping points, and a qualitative review of articles that explicitly treat social tipping points as potential solutions to climate change, this article identifies four deleterious patterns in the application of the STP concept in this recent wave of research on nonlinear social change: (i) premature labeling, (ii) not defining system boundaries and scales of analysis, (iii) not providing evidence for all characteristics of tipping processes, and (iv) not making use of existing social theories of change. Jointly, these patterns create a trend of overusing the concept. Recognizing and avoiding these patterns of “seeing the world through tipping point glasses” is important for the quality of scientific knowledge generated in this young field of inquiry and for future science‐policy interactions related to climate change. Future research should seek to identify empirical evidence for STPs while remaining open to the possibility that many social change processes are not instances of tipping, or that certain systems might not be prone to nonlinear change.
This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Ideas and Knowledge
Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Behavior Change and Responses
The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge
Different ways of framing the nexus between climate change and migration have been advanced in academic, advocacy and policy circles. Some understand it as a state-security issue, some take a protection (or human security) approach and yet others portray migration as an adaptation or climate risk management strategy. Yet we have little insight into how these different understandings of the ‘problem’ of climate change-related migration are beginning to shape the emergence of global governance in the climate regime. Through a focus on the UNFCCC Task Force on Displacement we argue that these different framings of climate change migration shape how actors understand the appropriate role of the TFD, including the substantive scope of its mandate; its operational priorities; the nature of its outputs and where it should be situated in the institutional architecture. We show that understanding the different framings of the nexus between climate change and migration – and how these framings are contested within the UNFCCC – can help to account for institutional development in this area of climate governance.
This article was named the winner of the 2020 Enloe Award. The committee commented:
This article embodies the spirit of the Enloe Award in providing a feminist understanding of the everyday experiences and strategies of poor women’s social movements against the authoritarian regime in Cambodia. It traces the co-constitution of gendered formations of the state and women’s collective action through an account of four distinct types of “gendered repertoires of contention” used by the women to protest Cambodia’s land grab. The critical-reflexive understanding of social movements offered here illuminates strategies of feminist resistance to authoritarian state power in Cambodia and beyond. The article stood out for its clarity and evidence-based narrative, and we are delighted that it has won the award.
ABSTRACT
As strongmen and autocrats become increasingly visible in global politics, what gendered resistances arise and how do these contend with repressive regimes? Since 2017, following a severe purge of his critics, Cambodia’s longstanding Prime Minister Hun Sen has put the country under a near total form of authoritarian rule. His regime has been bolstered by a distinct mode of accumulation involving large-scale land transfers to foreign and domestic allies, which have systematically evicted and dispossessed a large number of the country’s smallholder farmers and the urban poor of their homes and agricultural lands. Amid this surge of “land grabbing,” Cambodian women from across the country have led and sustained public protests to reclaim their lands. In this article, I study the routines and performances of poor women’s collective action against the state and outline four distinct types of “repertoires of contention” used by women in their protests: strategic positioning, anti-politics, self-sacrifice, and solidarity. I argue that these repertoires are embedded in and enact the authoritarian state that they contest and advance the notion of the “gendered authoritarian state” that is made visible in contentious interactions between the state and its dispossessed citizens.
Research on climate change and human mobility has posited migration as a potentially adaptive response. In the Pacific Islands region, international labour migration specifically is an important component of emerging climate change mobility policy, at both regional and national scales. However, the existence of opportunities for people in climate-exposed locations to move for work does not, on its own, advance climate justice. To gain insights into the nexus of climate justice, labour migration and adaptation, this paper explores the social and emotional experiences of international labour migration program participants from climate-vulnerable Tuvalu as well as the emergent climate mobility regime in which this migration is taking place, drawing on qualitative research undertaken on the emergent policy context, and with workers from Tuvalu on short-term contracts under Australia’s Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS). Their experiences, their perceptions of climate change, and their role as livelihood earners for families are explored to consider issues of climate justice in understanding labour migration as adaptation in the current policy context. While the workers benefited economically, they experienced significant social and emotional issues including poor mental health and family breakdown during their time working abroad, in addition to long-term climate change concerns. Further, the labour mobility program in which they participated does not recognize migration-as-adaptation or climate justice, even though these are an emergent priority in the climate mobility regime. This highlights the need to consider how international labour migration programs can be strengthened to advance climate justice for climate vulnerable populations on the move.
Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth 242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
p>Women are often assumed to be most vulnerable to environmental risk and climate change because of often-experienced constraints in mobility. A common-held assumption is that women are fixated in place and experience forced immobility in the context of environmental change, whilst the men can move to other places. In building on feminist and mobilities scholarship, this article critically interrogates this assumption and seeks to move towards a more plural understanding of gender-environment-mobility relations. Through a study of human mobility in coastal Bangladesh, we interrogate what it means for women to stay in places of environmental and climate risk and how staying may hamper or enhance small-scale mobilities. We also examine how labour mobilities by women get increased when moving to urban settlements as a response to environmental changes and lack of work in rural areas. In this manner, we demonstrate how gender-environment-mobility relations do not play out uniformly but are shaped by wider im/mobilities and specific social and environmental contexts.</p
The study examines the relationship between sudden- and gradual-onset climate events and migration, hypothesizing that this relationship is mediated by the adaptive capacity of affected individuals. We use survey data from regions of Cambodia, Nicaragua, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam that were affected by both types of events with representative samples of non-migrant residents and referral samples of migrants. Although some patterns are country-specific, the general findings indicate that less educated and lower-income people are less likely to migrate after exposure to sudden-onset climate events compared to their counterparts with higher levels of education and economic resources. These results caution against sweeping predictions that future climate-related events will be accompanied by widespread migration.
Global visions of environmental change consider gender equality to be a foundation of sustainable social-ecological systems. Similarly, social-ecological systems frameworks position gender equality as both a precursor to, and a product of, system sustainability. Yet, the degree to which gender equality is being advanced through social-ecological systems change is uncertain. We use the case of small-scale fisheries in the Pacific Islands region to explore the proposition that different social-ecological narratives: (1) ecological, (2) social-ecological, and (3) social, shape the gender equality priorities, intentions and impacts of implementing organizations. We conducted interviews with regional and national fisheries experts (n = 71) and analyzed gender commitments made within policies (n = 29) that influence small-scale fisheries. To explore these data, we developed a ‘Tinker-Tailor-Transform’ gender assessment typology. We find that implementing organizations aligned with the social-ecological and social narratives considered social (i.e., human-centric) goals to be equally or more important than ecological (i.e., eco-centric) goals. Yet in action, gender equality was pursued instrumentally to achieve ecological goals and/or shallow project performance targets. These results highlight that although commitments to gender equality were common, when operationalized commitments become diluted and reoriented. Across all three narratives, organizations mostly ‘Tinkered’ with gender equality in impact, for example, including more women in spaces that otherwise tended to be dominated by men. Impacts predominately focused on the individual (i.e., changing women) rather than driving communal-to-societal level change. We discuss three interrelated opportunities for organizations in applying the ‘Tinker-Tailor-Transform’ assessment typology, including its utility to assist organizations to orient toward intrinsic goals; challenge or reconfigure system attributes that perpetuate gender inequalities; and consciously interrogate discursive positions and beliefs to unsettle habituated policies, initiatives and theories of change.
In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.
Mobility is a key livelihood and risk management strategy, including in the context of climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced long standing concerns that migrant populations remain largely overlooked in economic development, adaptation to climate change, and spatial planning. We synthesize evidence across multiple studies that confirms the overwhelming preponderance of in-country and short distance rather than international migration in climate change hotspots in Asia and Africa. The emerging findings highlight the critical importance of addressing immobility and the intersecting social determinants that influence who can move and who cannot in development policy. This evidence suggests a more focused climate mobilities research agenda that includes understanding multiple drivers of mobility and multi-directional movement; intersecting social factors that determine mobility for some and immobility for others; and the implications for mobility and immobility under climate change and the COVID-19 recovery.
Sea level rise, tropical cyclones, saltwater intrusion, and coastal flooding along with many other natural hazards are increasingly common in many parts of the world, and regions like coastal Bangladesh are at the frontline of these impacts. Due, in part, to the ongoing climate crisis, male members of coastal households in Bangladesh are outmigrating temporarily or permanently. Reduced farm productivity can be blamed on this to a large extent. Men leave female members of their households behind in their coastal villages during the first phase of migration. This creates a new form of social injustice as women are not only exposed to the negative impacts of the climate crisis to a larger extent, but they also face the challenges of maintaining a farming livelihood as they confront patriarchal socio-cultural norms and expectations during the absence of male members of the families. Using the frameworks of critical development and political ecology, this paper unpacks how these farming women who stay in the rural villages in coastal Bangladesh have a higher social vulnerability then men do. More particularly, this paper illustrates the complex nature of social and environmental injustice, experienced by women because of the outmigration of male members of the households. An intersectional approach further explains how, in contrast to usual class / income privileges, religio-cultural norms and prohibitions result in women belonging to the ethno-religious majority being more vulnerable than minority women. This is due to restrictions from interacting alone with men to whom they are not related, which reduces their access to the knowledge and resources that flows though male-dominated social networks. This article contributes to our understanding of the complex interactions between humans and the environment, mediated by various social, cultural, and political factors, and provides critical policy insights on inclusive adaptation and long-term sustainability.
This article examines the factors shaping the perception of climate change and the relationship between climate change perception and migration. Drawing on a 691-case survey of climate perceptions in Cambodia, it explores three dimensions of climate change perception. The first is the relationship of climate change perceptions to space, geography, and scale. Second is the influence of livelihoods to climate change perceptions, and third is the relationship of climate perceptions to migration. The results show that perceptions of climate change are not significantly influenced by spatial distance, meaning that divergent or even opposite climate perceptions might coexist within a relatively small geographical area. The data, however, show that climate perceptions are significantly influenced by both engagement in certain primary livelihoods and contextually specified socioeconomic marginality. Despite this subjectivity of climate perceptions, a strong, statistically significant relationship exists between climate change perception and the prevalence of migrants in the household. Overarchingly, the article challenges efforts to infer direct linkages between climate data and human behavior, arguing instead for a more subjectively attuned understanding of the impacts of climate change on migration, to account for the multiple factors that influence perceptions of and responses to climate change.
Ecologically unequal exchange theory posits asymmetric net flows of biophysical resources from poorer to richer countries. To date, empirical evidence to support this theoretical notion as a systemic aspect of the global economy is largely lacking. Through environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output modelling, we provide empirical evidence for ecologically unequal exchange as a persistent feature of the global economy from 1990 to 2015. We identify the regions of origin and final consumption for four resource groups: materials, energy, land, and labor. By comparing the monetary exchange value of resources embodied in trade, we find significant international disparities in how resource provision is compensated. Value added per ton of raw material embodied in exports is 11 times higher in high-income countries than in those with the lowest income, and 28 times higher per unit of embodied labor. With the exception of embodied land for China and India, all other world regions serve as net exporters of all types of embodied resources to high-income countries across the 1990-2015 time period. On aggregate, ecologically unequal exchange allows high-income countries to simultaneously appropriate resources and to generate a monetary surplus through international trade. This has far-reaching implications for global sustainability and for the economic growth prospects of nations.
It is widely accepted that climate change may be contributing to population movement and has gendered effects. The relationship between climate change as a direct cause of migration continues to give rise to debates concerning vulnerabilities, while at the same time gendered dimensions of vulnerabilities remain limited to binary approaches. There is limited cross-fertilization between disciplines that go beyond comparison between males and females but interrogate gender in association with climate change and migration. Here, we seek to develop an analytical lens to the nexus between gender, migration and climate change in producing, reproducing and sustaining at risk conditions and vulnerabilities. When gender and mobility are conceptualized as a process, and climate change as a risk modifier, the nexus between them can be better interrogated. Starting by using gender as an organizing principle that structures and stratifies relations entails viewing gender not as a category that distinguishes males and females but as a discursive process of social construction that (re)produces subjectivities and inequalities. Gender is a dynamic process that shapes and (re)produces vulnerabilities and consequently shapes mediation of climate impacts and migration and is also shaped by symbolic processes that go beyond households and communities.
Abstract: Young Sahelian farmers are crossing the Sahara toward Europe. They are sold as slave labor, held ransom for money from their families, beaten and spit on. Many die in the desert or drown at sea. Yet, knowing the dangers, they go. The media depicts them as ‘climate refugees’ – running from climate stress. These emigrants and their families, however, rarely mention the weather as a cause of their plight at home or their decisions to leave. They are fleeing abusive policies, exposure to markets, debt peonage, failures of social security systems and a sense of hopelessness in a world where they never expect to have a dignified role in their families or communities. Casting them as climate refugees occludes the multiple forces that lead them to emigrate and diverts attention from potential responses. This casting mobilizes, thus validating, European xenophobia to motivate Europeans to fight climate change. While climate investments appear responsible and progressive, the climate focus denies the colonial and post-colonial histories of emigrants’ plights thereby threatening to deepen their crisis.
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.
Climate adaptation that does not addressed gender and power inequalities is maladaptation. Those who are vulnerable and marginalized, with limited access to resources and assets, are already facing formidable barriers in adapting to climate change. Ignoring this challenge is maladaptive, as it adds to the vulnerabilities of those already burdened disproportionately and encourages new types of exclusions.
Meeting the challenge requires that we transform our societies into fairer and more just organizations. Unfettering the agency of individuals and collective groups, through
policies and actions that promote gender-transformative adaptation, can help achieve this change.
Academic, political, and policy debates about the connection between environmental change and human migration have long focused on migration drivers and outcomes, resulting in a limited discussion between the discourses of “desolate climate refugees” and “environmental migrants as agents of adaptation.” These perspectives remain dominant, particularly in policy and media circles, despite academic critique and the recent emergence of more diverse approaches. In this intervention, we contribute to the recent turn in environmental migration research by seeking to better ground and pluralize our understanding of how environmental change and human mobility relate. We do so by offering a mobilities perspective that centers on the practices, motives, and experiences of mobility and immobility in the context of environmental change: When and why do people decide to move—or not to move—in response to environmental changes? How do they cope with migration pressures? Where do they move, under what conditions, and who can or must stay behind? This approach attends to the diverse aspirations and differential capabilities that underlie particular practices of movement or nonmovement, reflecting both individual characteristics as well as interconnections with uneven power relations across local, regional, and global scales. A mobilities approach offers a starting point for an expanded research agenda on environmental im/mobilities. This enables academic analysis and policy discussion of the human (im)mobility‐environmental change nexus to become better attuned to the actual practice and heterogeneous needs of those affected.
This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development
Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values‐Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation
Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.
Informal settlements i.e., slums emerge from the interplay of multidimensional factors related to urbanization and sustainability. While the contribution of urban factors is well understood, the role of external drivers, such as uncontrolled migration to urban areas, is rarely addressed in research or policy-making. This study develops a novel conceptualization of slums by reviewing the pushing and pulling factors of migration and their contribution to informal settlements through 1) a socio-ecological system approach and 2) the concept of adaptive capacity. Further, it advances the discussion around synergistic and coherent policy-making in the urban context by reviewing three urban agendas and further using water as a case with the concept of cross-cutting domains. We show that the emergence of urban challenges can, and should be, linked to the root causes of flows into urban areas. Understanding these linkages through a socio-ecological system framework opens a window for knowledge-based policy development and addressing the question of how to avoid unsustainable urban development. Urbanization is one of the phenomena where the excessive complexity and dimensions of problems should not hamper action but instead, actions should be encouraged and enabled with synergistic and integrative pathways for sustainable urban development.
An emerging body of work has critiqued the concept of climate adaptation, highlighting the structural constraints impeding marginalised communities across the Global South from being able to adapt. This article builds on such work through analysis of debt-bonded brick workers in Cambodia, formerly small farmers. It argues that the detrimental impacts of climate change experienced by farmers-turned-workers across the rural-urban divide is due to their precarity. In doing so, this article draws on a conceptualisation of precarity which recognises it as emerging from the specific political economy of Cambodia, and as something that is neither new, nor confined to conditions of labour alone. As such, in looking to precarity as a means of conceptualising the relations of power which shape impacts of climate change, we advance a 'climate precarity' lens as a means of understanding how adaptation to climate change is an issue of power, rooted in a specific geographical context, and mobile over the rural-urban divide.
In social movements and contentious politics, the factors determining success or failure of a movement remain contested since different scholars tend to argue differently. As a contribution to this debate, this paper draws on two cases representing the relative success and failure of movements targeting the government of Cambodia and foreign joint venture investments to address the communities’ grievances. The paper reveals that, while other factors such as strategies, resource mobilisation, networks and corporate behaviour remain necessary to the debate, the variation in outcome is essentially determined by the patron–client network, a political dynamic employed by the neo-patrimonial rulers to cling onto power.
This article addresses how gender norms impact the process of migration, and what this means for the use of migration as an adaptation strategy to cope with environmental stressors. Data was collected through qualitative fieldwork, taking the form of semi-structured and open-ended interviews and focus group discussions from a Dhaka slum and three villages in Southern Bangladesh’s Bhola district. Our data revealed that women migrate when environmental stress threatens livelihoods and leave male household members unable to earn enough income for their families. Employing an analytical framework that focuses on the perceptions of individuals, this article shows how gender norms create social costs for women who migrate. Women thus have ambivalent feelings about migration. On the one hand, they do not wish to migrate, taking on a double work load, forsaking their purdah, and facing the stigma that follows. On the other hand, women see migration as a means to help their families, and live a better life. While social costs negatively affect the utilization and efficiency of female migration as an adaptation strategy to environmental stressors, it becomes clear that female migration is imperative to sustain livelihoods within the Bhola community.
In Ratanakiri province, home to a large share of Cambodia's indigenous minorities, land commercialization involving large-scale land transfers and in-migration has led to shrinking access to land for indigenous households. Drawing on qualitative interviews and a household survey conducted in Ratanakiri, this paper explores the links between social reproduction and agrarian production in the current phase of agrarian transition through the lens of everyday gendered experiences. It argues that while wage labour is becoming an essential component of agrarian livelihoods for land-poor indigenous households, gendered hierarchies mediate access to local wage labour opportunities due to the incompatibilities between care work and paid labour. This paper contributes to the literature by exposing locally-specific processes through which gender-differentiated impacts are produced under multiple modes of dispossession. It also illuminates the links between dispossession and social reproduction and the tensions between capitalist accumulation and care activities in agrarian trajectories following land commercialization.
This paper explores the 20-year evolution of the social-ecological systems framework (SESs). Although a first definition of SES dates back to 1988, Berkes and Folke more thoroughly used the concept in 1998 to analyze resilience in local resource management systems. Since then studies of interlinked human and natural systems have emerged as a field on its own right, promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in a wide set of fields and practices. As the SES concept celebrates its 20-year existence we decided to make an overview of how authors use the concept in relation to research that deals with social and ecological linkages. Hence, we conducted a review of the SES concept using the Scopus database, analyzing a random set of journal articles on social-ecological systems (n = 50) regarding definitions of SES, authors’ main sources of inspiration in using the concept, as well as document type, subject area, and other relevant information. Although there is a steady increase of SES publications, we found that 61% of the papers analyzed did not even provide a definition of the term social-ecological system(s), a shortcoming that makes case comparisons difficult and reduces the usefulness of the concept. We also found three common SES frameworks that authors seem to be most commonly inspired by, referred to here as the original, the robustness, and multitier frameworks, respectively. The first can be characterized as a descriptive framework, the latter two more as diagnostic frameworks, useful for modeling. Although it would be a bit presumptuous of us to come up with a more thorough definition of the SES concept in this paper, we urge SES scholars to be more meticulous in making explicit what they mean by a social-ecological system when conducting SES research.
In this article, we extend a theory of disorientations to reveal how attempts to fix and control both water and people are disrupting once‐fluid relationships between the Tonle Sap Lake and communities who have lived with‐on the lake for generations. Using ethnographic and participatory mapping methods, we examine the socio‐ecological dynamics that preceded and succeeded in the forced relocation of three floating communities in 2018. We argue that communities’ experiences challenge land‐centric and event‐centric understandings of displacement that pathologise fluid lifeways and fail to account for the materiality of water that has shaped floating villages’ multi‐generational relationships with their wetland ecology. We develop the concept of disorientations to illuminate villagers’ experiences of relocation within a collapsing aquatic ecosystem—a collapse catalysed by state efforts to impose fixity on both hydrological flow and community mobility. The lens of disorientations invites displacement debates to consider materialities of place—whether pulsing water or living, shifting soils.
Series Blurb: Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise, lively introductions to each volume crystallize the main line of debate in the field. Is there too much gender in politics, too much stereotyping of female and male? Or is there too little gender, too little attention to differences between women and men? Should feminists be challenging male dominance by opening up politics to women? Or is 'women' a fictitious entity that fails to address differences by class or race? Is equality best served by denying differences between the sexes? Or best promoted by stressing the special needs of women? The essays in Feminism and RPolitics answer these questions in a variety of ways, but all see feminism as transforming the way we think about and act in politics. Spanning issues of citizenship and political representation, the ambiguities of identity politics, and the problems in legislating for sexual equality, the readings provide an exciting overview of recent developments. This outstanding collection will be essential reading for any feminist who has doubted the importance of political studies, and any student of politics who has doubted the relevance of feminism.
This chapter examines apolitical mono-causal depictions of ‘climate-induced displacement’ by focusing on communities whose livelihoods are differently affected by processes of environmental stress on the basis of their position within diverse systems of power. More specifically, it considers how the environment influences mobility decisions in the context of environmental stress such as climate change. It looks at the experiences of four countries—Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Ghana—to illustrate how (im)mobility decisions in terms of structures of political and social power and disempowerment affect the livelihoods of vulnerable households. It also discusses how the exercise of power differs across different social groups and concludes with a reflection on the legitimization, maintenance, and contestation of power structures.
This article explores the trajectory of three rural, precarious Cambodian women as they deploy land as a means of undertaking survival work in Cambodia. Using a gendered lens vis‐à‐vis the concept of autonomy, this article rethinks distress sales of land and collateralized land for microfinance borrowing as forms of everyday autonomy. By highlighting women's central role in undertaking social reproductive labour to reproduce the rural household, these acts of distress land sale and debt‐taking are understood as forms of ‘survival work’, acts that ensure the day‐to‐day survival of the household and form the basis for broader projects of autonomy. Although we remain ambivalent about the long‐term prospects for resistance through credit‐taking in particular, we ultimately highlight the need for greater attention to variegated oppositional agency in the path to autonomy to understand the gendered labour of everyday survival in rural life.
Resilience has become an important priority in many areas of development policy, particularly as a way to understand and manage climate change. Notably, an array of international actors has emerged which seeks to promote and operationalize resilience as a framework for the planning and management of urban areas. Critics argue that the considerable influence wielded by these external actors means that resilience is imposed as a fully formed policy agenda and set of tools and procedures with little relevance to the local context. Using the case of Cambodia, this analysis will show that rather than being simply a development buzzword, an actually existing resilience is produced through friction as the interests of international actors meets the particularities of the Cambodian context. In Cambodia, the resilience agenda is strongly managerial, addressing climate risk through infrastructure and technical assistance that steers clear of engaging with the politically charged roots of differing vulnerabilities in urban areas.
The question whether and how climatic factors influence human migration has gained both academic and public interest in the past years. Based on two meta-analyses, this paper systematically reviews the quantitative empirical literature on climate-related migration from a methodological perspective. In total, information from 127 original micro- and macro-level studies is analyzed to assess how different concepts, research designs, and analytical methods shape our understanding of climate migration. We provide an overview of common methodological approaches and present evidence on their potential implications for the estimation of climatic impacts. We identify five key challenges, which relate to the i) measurement of migration and ii) climatic events, iii) the integration and aggregation of data, iv) the identification of causal relationships, and v) the exploration of contextual influences and mechanisms. Advances in research and modelling are discussed together with best practice cases to provide guidance to researchers studying the climate-migration nexus. We recommend for future empirical studies to employ approaches that are of relevance for and reflect local contexts, ensuring high levels of comparability and transparency.
This article analyses the gendered dimension of rural livelihood reorganization in Cambodia, and its consequences on food security. With the growing need for cash, men predominantly have engaged in wage work. However, out of necessity, women also engage in wage work. Thus, new gender divisions of productive labour contribute to reshaping normative gender roles and spaces, and provide women some autonomy, in a way. At the same time, since women remain responsible for family food procurement they are dependent on men's income. Above all, the majority of women experience stress from lack of time and lack of money for food.
Many rural communities in the Lower Mekong region are vulnerable to the climate uncertainty induced by climate change due to high rate of poverty, lack of agricultural technology, and heavy reliance on the environment for their livelihoods. Rural people are likely to migrate to urban areas in response to the climate impacts and thanks to the rises in the number of cities, urban areas, and industrial zones in this region over the last decades. We selected a rural area in Cambodia to examine the link between climate impacts and rural out-migration because the majority of Cambodian territory is located in the Lower Mekong Basin which has experienced long-term climate change. Through an empirical study which consisted of an integrated quantitative and qualitative research approach in Kampong Cham province, we found the temperature showed a significant (α = 0.05) trend of +0.027C°/year, while rainfall showed a non-significative trend, but it had a marked inter-annual variability over the last two decades. The migration trend increased: most farmers' families of small and medium sized farms and who experienced more climate impacts had more family members who migrated. Migration is one of the solutions for farmers trying to maintain their livelihoods and incomes, but mass migration causes gaps in the agricultural and rural labour force. This study implies that enhancing farmers' adaptive capacity in agriculture will contribute to improving the migration landscape.
The author uses data from the Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey in 2014 to investigate the impact of remittances on poverty and inequality. Unlike other studies that use income to measure poverty, we employ monthly per capita consumption. We also consider remittances as a substitute income rather than an exogenous transfer. Therefore, imputing counterfactual expenditure in a scenario of no migration no remittances is necessary. To test for selection, a Heckman model is required under the null hypothesis that non-recipient households are randomly drawn from the population. Contrary to some previous studies, we find significant effect of selection bias and evidence that remittances reduce the poverty rate by 2 percent on the national level or 5 percent for recipient households. Furthermore, remittances decrease the poverty gap by 2.5 percent or 6.6 percent for a sub-sample of recipient households, but they also increase inequality by 1 percent, as measured by the GINI coefficient.
While there has been increasing scholarship exploring the social, cultural, and political dimensions of climate change migration, there is to date limited research situating climate migration studies within geopolitical history and land struggles, particularly in post‐conflict states like Cambodia. Four decades after the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975‐9) ended, rural migration and land struggles remain a central aspect of Cambodia's political and economic life. Since the beginning of the Cambodian civil war (1970), rural populations have repeatedly been forced to move from their land. However, the geopolitical dimension of land has not been widely considered in current climate change migration literature. To explore these dynamic relationships between land, migration, and geopolitical history, this article investigates both historical narratives and everyday relationships with land of land(less) migrants in Veal Veaeng District, Western Cambodia, which was a former war‐zone and a Khmer Rouge stronger during the 1980s and 1990s. This paper argues that political history plays a vital role in defining migration trajectories in Cambodia, especially how historical factors define land struggles. Through exploring migrants and land frontier dynamics, this article discovers that poor peasants have been pushed between the labour markets and land frontiers.
Despite increased international commitment to disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction (DiDRR) people with disabilities remain largely unseen, unheard and unaccounted for in DRR processes and planning. This is most marked amongst women with disabilities who experience specific gender, disability and poverty-based disadvantages, which disasters exacerbate. Our research found that women with disabilities are disproportionally impacted by disasters and are the least able to access institutional support across the preparedness, response and recovery phases of disaster events. Furthermore, the increased threat of violence following disasters heightens their risk of additional harm. In the absence of formal supports women with disabilities have few choices but to rely upon the social capital of their households and neighbours for assistance. They ‘recover’ in whatever ways they can – through short-term loans, reduced food consumption and/or migration – each carry significant costs to their longer-term resilience. This paper unpacks the root causes of women with disabilities’ marginalisation in disaster contexts, many of which are extensions of exclusionary processes that play out in their daily lives. We also present steps to position women at the centre of DRR discourse, which will benefit all.
Using innovative diagramming and a feminist political ecology (FPE) approach, this paper examines gender, power, and equity considerations in the delivery of climate information service (CIS) to smallholder farmers. Based upon a multi-method triangulation fieldwork involving a survey (n = 998), participatory listing and scoring activities (n = 82), and network diagramming (n = 180), the paper illuminates several structural barriers to acquiring CIS. These barriers include gender norms and expectations, patriarchal values, time poverty, and the format in which technical climate forecasts are presented to illiterate farmers. Another key finding is the multiple subject positions beyond gender within which women are embedded, such as the intersection of seniority , religion, class, and positions within households, that further reconfigure access to CIS. In addition to contributing to emerging intersectional research in FPE, the paper proposes innovative ways of studying household relations and politics. More specifically, it illustrates how feminist political ecologists could deploy participatory network diagramming to provide a nuanced, powerful, and graphic account of subtle politics at the household scale.
The time of gender-blind climate change policies and projects has passed. However, while research is increasingly moving away from understanding the relationship between gender and climate change in a linear, tech-nocratic, and instrumental way, gender and climate change policy-makers and project practitioners are having difficulties operationalizing this progress. In the meantime, as climate change effects are increasingly felt worldwide, and because the policy context after the Paris Agreement (2015) is bringing new challenges for gender and equity concerns, (re-)politicizing the climate justice debate in a policy and project-relevant way is more crucial than ever. My aim in this article is to contribute to this endeavor by exploring how a feminist political ecology framework applied to a specific case study in Nicaragua-one of the countries most affected by climate change in the world-can generate new policy and project-relevant lessons and insights from the ground that can in turn strengthen the conceptual debate on gender and climate change adaptation. Based on ethno-graphic fieldwork carried out in 2013 and 2014, as well as eight years of professional experience as a development worker in Nicaragua, I discuss the workings of power in the feminist political ecology of climate change adaptation; in so doing I raise new questions that will, I hope, lead policy-makers and project practitioners to explore how adaptation processes could open up the conceptual possibility for emancipation, transformation, and new ways of living life in common.
More than 75 per cent of the world’s known stateless belong to minorities. Building upon ethnographic research conducted between 2008–2017, this paper considers the case of ethnic Vietnamese minority populations in Cambodia. Members of this group are long-term residents, having been born and raised in the country for generations, with the exception of the period during the Khmer Rouge regime when they were forcibly deported to Vietnam. Since their return to Cambodia in the early 1980s, individuals from this group have been regarded by Cambodian authorities as ‘immigrants’. This paper examines how discriminatory policies, laws and administrative practices regulate individual and collective identities, while creating categories that determine social inclusion and exclusion. In doing so, this paper makes visible the ambivalence of law and rights – both as tools for the construction of exclusionary citizenship, but also as instruments which minorities to contest their social exclusion.
Migration from Cambodia is a major livelihood strategy for rural communities, with most rural families having at least one, usually younger, member migrating in search of work. The pervasive nature of this phenomenon relates to Cambodia’s troubled political past, and the country’s political economy that structures choice and opportunity. Under-investment in the agrarian economy together with unequal access to credit and productive resources leaves many rural Cambodians with little option but to migrate to boost family income. Thailand is the number one destination for rural Cambodians. Most have an undocumented status, putting them at risk of arrest and deportation. The return of more than 200,000 migrants to Cambodia over a two-week period in 2014 was precipitated by the Thai military’s seizure of power and migrants’ fear of the consequences of political instability, given their still vivid historical memory of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror during the 1970s. Interviews with Cambodian migrants and members of their families are examined within a wider political and economic context to gain insight into migrants’ motivations and decision-making. The expulsion of migrants from Thailand casts light on the compulsive nature of migration, despite the high risks and precarious conditions under which undocumented migration takes place.
Facing land grabs and eviction in the name of development, women worldwide increasingly join land rights struggles despite often deeply engrained images of female domesticity and conventional gender norms. Yet, the literature on female agency in the context of land struggles has remained largely underexplored. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, my findings suggest that land rights activism in Cambodia has undergone a gendered re-framing process. Reasoning that women use non-violent means of contestation and are less prone to violence from security personnel, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) push women affected by land grabs and eviction to the frontline of protests. Moreover, female activists are encouraged to publicly display emotions, such as the experienced pain behavior that sharply contrasts with Cambodian norms of feminine modesty. I critically question this women-to-the-front strategy and, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s politics of emotions approach, show the adverse risks for female activists. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the instrumentalization of female bodies and emotions in land rights protests perpetuate gender disparities instead of strengthening female agency in the Cambodian society and opening up political space for women.