Climate migration myths 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.
While those 'trapped' or who choose to stay in areas affected by climate change represent a substantial policy issue, there only a small amount of empirical work specifically targeting such populations. The scant attention that is afforded to immobility often emphasizes financial constraints as factors driving (involuntary) immobility. As an essential part of the mobility spectrum, the complexity of immobility in crisis, including its political dimensions, warrants thorough investigation. In response to these gaps, this contribution locates environmental immobility within mobilities studies, its conceptual complexities, and, finally, illustrates the importance of political factors in shaping (im)mobilities. The findings are based on semi-structured interviews conducted in two developing countries experiencing the impacts of climate change. We delve into the socio-cultural and economic nature of (im)mobilities as they interact with political forces, specifically by exploring international bilateral agreements (Senegal) and a relocation program (Vietnam). In political spaces that are dominated by a desire to limit human mobility and (re)produce stasis, we challenge traditional dichotomies between mobile/immobile and sedentary/migration polices by underlining how policy interventions can simultaneously promote mobility and immobility, demonstrating complex co-existing mobilities. Keeping people in place can, in fact, mean allowing the very same people to move.
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This paper emphasises the impacts of international migration on old-age perceptions and norms within transnational families, and, specifically, analyses the roles of the zero generation, defined as the parents of first-generation migrants, both as non-migrant counterparts to their children abroad and as older migrants themselves. Transnational caregiving research has demonstrated that for many migrants and their families care arrangements must be negotiated across national borders, yet the agency of transnational older adults has been largely neglected. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2013 in Liège, Belgium, and Oujda, Morocco, the present paper examines the circulation of care between Moroccan adult migrants and their ageing ascendants. This paper exposes the duality of migrants' ascendants as caregivers and recipients, asserting, firstly, that receiving care is not synonymous with passivity, and that, secondly, migrants' ascendants are also the initiators of transnational practices. In both roles, this paper underlines mobility as a strategy used by migrants' parents to maintain intergenerational solidarity across national borders, but that this care mobility is limited by macro-level migration policies, here exemplified by the Belgian migration regime.
The study of the relationship between environmental change and human mobility has largely focused on the movement of people as it is driven by environmental change with little regard for those who stay when faced with many of the same adverse conditions. An emerging body of work recognizes and seeks to understand the lack of migration, or immobility, in the contexts of environmental and climatic change, primarily through the notion of "trapped populations." Theoretically, however, our understandings of immobility in relation to environmental change are underdeveloped and oversimplified, and do not do justice to the diversity, dynamism, or unevenness of (im)mobilities. In order to advance knowledge, this paper connects knowledge from environmental migration studies to immobility in broader migration research. Although there is no silver theoretical bullet, it explores the strengths and weaknesses of three frameworks in explaining and understanding (im)mobility decision-making, patterns, and consequences: (1) the New Economics of Labour Migration; (2) the aspirations-(cap)abilities framework; and (3) the mobilities paradigm. In order to break away from both sedentary and mobility biases, it asserts that scholars should theorize and analyze the entire mobility spectrum in the face of environmental change, rather than considering immobility as a separate outcome.
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