Gendering Resilience: Myths and Stereotypes in the Discourse on Climate‐induced Migration

Abstract

The research article critically investigates recent European policy proposals that promote migration as an adaptation strategy to increase the resilience of communities vulnerable to the environmental crisis. Such proposals have been welcomed for breaking with alarmist discourses that framed climate-induced migration as a threat to national or international security. The present article seeks to contribute to this ongoing debate by bringing in a fresh perspective that has so far been neglected: the perspective of gender. Drawing on a poststructuralist perspective on gender the article reveals that policy debates on climate-induced migration take place within highly gendered discourses. Applying this perspective to recent policy reports on climate change, migration and resilience, the article helps to paint a more nuanced picture of the highly criticized notion of resilience. The analysis shows that, on the one hand, resilience thinking helped overcoming a masculinized discourse of security as control. On the other hand, it reproduces a series of 'gender myths' about the role of women in the so-called Global South.The issue of climate change-induced migration is fiercely debated in academic, political and public media discourses. These debates have long been dominated by alarmist threat images and projections of looming waves of hundreds of millions of climate refugees in the near future. Recently, such alarmist voices have been replaced by a more modest discourse, which revolves around the notion of resilience. In line with resilience thinking this discourse has stressed the complexity and multi-causality of climate-induced migration. Most importantly, climate migration has been normatively reevaluated -from posing a threat to (inter)national security to being a potential adaptation measure that might reduce the vulnerability of communities in climate hot-spot regions (see Scheffran et al., 2012). In the academic literature, there is a heated normative debate about this discursive shift. Some have welcomed the rise of resilience for its openness and departure from a defense-oriented approach to security (Corry, 2014). Others have condemned resilience as yet another expression of a neoliberal hegemony, which is shifting the burden of protection from state agencies to the vulnerable communities themselves (Bettini, 2014;Methmann and Oels, 2015).The present article seeks to contribute to this ongoing debate by bringing in a fresh perspective on this debate that has so far been neglected: the perspective of gender discourse. It asks how we can evaluate the recent shift in discourses of climate-induced migration, when they are read through the lens of gender. Drawing on a poststructuralist understanding of gender, the article seeks to reveal the gendered subject positions and narratives in resilience thinking. For this, the first section very shortly introduces the poststructuralist understanding of gender and its operationalization. Section 2 distinguishes between two ideal-typical discourses of climate chan...

Review article: Towards a context-driven research: a state-of-the-art review of resilience research on climate change

“…It is on the basis of the premise that adaptive resilience is good that naturalist resilience research ties up with climate risk management, as a way of managing ecosystem services (critical for survival), under conditions of ecological and societal shocks and disturbances (Boyd et al, 2015;Berbés-Blázquez et al, 2017). The constructivist emphasis on resilience to climate change as system transformation refers to the emergent transformation of systems into something new (Rothe, 2017;Béné et al, 2018). Transformative resilience is typically defined as the system's internal capacities, capabilities and relations that enables it to create a new condition in which responsibilities may be shifted.…”

“…In constructivist resilience research the justice question is placed in a context of broader socio-political processes of transformation: adaptive systems can be unjust and oppressive (Fainstein, 2014;Weichselgartner and Kelman, 2015;Huang, Boranbay-Akan and Huang, 2016;McGreavy, 2016;Ribault, 2019). Short-term, incremental, adaptive response to shocks and disturbances may blur long term sustainability vision, while dominant (or dominating) stakeholders typically reify existing climate policy efforts in their (standardized) adaptive responses (Lockie, 2016;Derickson, 2016;Rothe, 2017;Estêvão, Calado and Capucha, 2017;Ribault, 2019). Kythreotis & Bristow (2017) call this phenomenon the 'resilience trap' -the reinforcement of established power relations and contemporary resilience discourses (Blühdorn, 2013;Redman, 2014;Yanarella & Levine, 2014; https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2020-90 Preprint.…”

And yet it moves! (Climate) migration as a symptom in the Anthropocene

“…Critical studies emphasise the complexity of the interactions between environmental change and mobility, which intersect with social difference (gender, class, race, etc. ) and play out on multiple temporal and spatial scales (White 2011, Methmann 2014, Boas 2015, Baldwin 2016, Fröhlich 2016, Hardy, Milligan and Heynen 2017, Rothe 2017, Gioli and Milan 2018, Telford 2018). Case studies furthermore reveal how simplistic narratives about climate refugee/migrants not only blanket over such differences, but also erode the agency of those involved and overlook the ways in which mobilities are part of coping and adaptation strategies (McNamara and Gibson 2009, Barnett and Campbell 2010, Gray 2011, Farbotko and Lazrus 2012, Smith and McNamara 2014, Adams 2016, Ahmed et al 2019.…”

About Time! The Abyss of the Future and End(s) of Subjectivity in (Climate) Dystopias

“…The setting is the Southwest United States, and this can represent an important inversion compared to the tendency to project the impacts of climate change (with the related repertoire of misery and marginalisation, chaos, risk and danger) "elsewhere", in some "Othered" landscape in the global Southsuch as Bangladesh, an African megacity or dryland (Manzo, 2010;Giuliani, 2017). While the brunt of climate impacts risks being borne by groups at the fringes of global capital, in particular in the postcolonial global South (Roberts and Parks, 2007;Nixon, 2011;Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015), many critical interventions have stigmatised the ways in which a victimization of the vulnerable global South facilitates the reproduction of the inequalities from which such differential vulnerability stems (Farbotko, 2010;Manzo, 2010;Baldwin, 2016b;Rothe, 2017). The localisation of vulnerability and danger in the global South often builds upon and reproduces instances of racialization, Othering and orientalism.…”