Labour migration amidst ecological change

Abstract

One of the grand questions for research on the impacts of climate change is whether people can rely on migration to safeguard progress towards development even while experiencing severe environmental hardship. This is the 'migration as adaptation' hypothesis. Labour migration theory proposes assumptions about the use of migration by people faced with economic uncertainty and limited access to capital to raise standards of development. This paper asks how environmental stress affects labour migration, and evaluates the labour migration arising from a spectrum of ecological stress, from increasingly variable precipitation to catastrophic flooding in Honduras and Malawi. Evidence suggests that environmental stress changes the nature of labour migration. New environmental forms of mobility do not take forms predicted by labour migration theory; migrations are not made with the purpose of exploiting economic opportunities; they do not take place on the basis of rational choice, particularly as displaced persons are frequently emotionally stressed; and among environmental migrants are those less likely to be able to absorb costs and extract benefits associated with migration (i.e. the unwell, the elderly or the unskilled). Nevertheless, social networks still remain the principal medium for conferring access to labour alternatives and resources to invest in migration. In the end, the remittances that environmental migrants send are less likely to be used for investment in development.

Migration as a driver of changing household structures: implications for local livelihoods and adaptation

“…In the evidence presented from Kolar and Gulbarga, I find that remittances are less likely to be used for investment in proactive risk management and are often stop-gap measures for poor households to repay debts and cope with everyday risks. This suggests that improvements to well-being through remittances must be supplemented by addressing wider, structural obstacles to development and vulnerability reduction, confirming similar findings in other regions (De Haas, 2007;Wrathall & Suckall, 2015).…”

Moving in and out of vulnerability: Interrogating migration as an adaptation strategy along a rural–urban continuum in India

“…However, the option to migrate is often available only to those who can incur the significant economic and psycho‐social costs that moving demands (De Haan, ; Kothari, ). Migration can also have negative impacts: migrants often enter unsafe, precarious livelihoods in urban areas, tend to live in risk‐prone locations, and are often disempowered because of shifts in the influence of their social networks in cities, and loss of existing networks of kinship and care (Bettini & Gioli, ; Bhagat, ; Michael et al, ; Patil & Giri, ; Wrathall & Suckall, ). Further, moving can leave additional work burdens on those left behind, predominantly women and older people (Chindarkar, ; Desai & Banerji, ), and leave residual communities in rural areas with compromised capacity (Robson & Nayak, ; Warner & Afifi, ; Singh ).…”

One step forward, two steps back? The fading contours of (in)justice in competing discourses on climate migration

“…Largely mimicking existing debates on ‘migration and development’ (see Gioli et al . ; in particular Bettini and Gioli ; Wrathall and Suckall ), this boils down to looking at the role of labour migration, and of individual or collective financial and social remittances, as buffers during environmental disaster (for a review see Le De et al . ) and as a means for climate adaptation.…”