Slow, small and shared voluntary relocations: Learning from the experience of migrants living on the urban fringes of Khulna, Bangladesh

Abstract

The paper conceptualises the process of voluntary relocation undertaken by rural farmers to informal settlements in coastal cities. These are journeys that occur without formal institutional support, utilising migrants' own agency. Learning from these community-driven relocations has merit in rethinking climate change adaptation at the regional level. In this paper we present stories of 17 families who have progressively relocated to the fringes of Khulna city in southwestern Bangladesh. We observe three key attributes: first, relocations are slow, neither singular nor immediately completed, but rather take months of careful back and forth journeys of family members between their places of origin and destination. Second, relocations rely on small networks of relatives and acquaintances at the destination. Third, relocations are built on shared responsibilities distributed among a range of actors in places of origin and destination. We conclude that these slow, small and shared relocations are likely to be realised as forms of ongoing adaptation by rural farmers if their aspirational mobilities, social relations and supports are maintained at a regional scale. This kind of migration as adaptation may bring about just outcomes for those displaced without necessarily promoting rigid planning interventions that tend to fix resettlement solutions in place and time.

Commoning the city for survival in urban informal settlements

“…Unlike established slums such as the one in Kallyanpur – which are the typical destination for landless migrants in Bangladeshi urban centres – these families were located in the urban fringes. Some negotiated shelter on privately owned agricultural land in exchange for agricultural services for their absentee patron, while others lived on vacant government land with consent from the political elites (see for details Alam and Miller, 2019).…”

Climate-induced migrant's hopeful journey toward security: Pushing the boundaries of gendered vulnerability and adaptability in Bangladesh

“…Here, the study describes these displaced people as climateinduced migrants since the compounding impacts of climate change leave people no option but to flee from their place of origin or homeland to seek a better life. Various scholars (El-Hinnawi, 1985;Myers, 1993;Jacobson, 1998;Black, 2001;Gorlick, 2007;Mallick and Vogt, 2013;Alam and Miler, 2019) have identified three categories of climate-induced migrants and the triggering mechanisms of their displacement: (i) temporary migration due to climate stress; (ii) permanent migration associated with significant destruction of their living environment; (iii) and migration for a better livelihood due to environmental disruptions in their places of origin. This article refers to climate-induced migrants predominantly from the southern and south-eastern parts of Bangladesh, the regions most vulnerable to climate change impacts (Shamsuddoha et al, 2012), which broadly fall under the three categories defined above.…”

Climate mobilities, rights and justice: Complexities and particularities

“…This is in part because the complexities of agency, culture, power, temporality and governance that shape how people live in, and possibly leave, a climate-impacted place are many. Meanwhile, the concepts of mobility, habitability, identity, values and place are variously and not always uniformly perceived and contested by residents, institutions and others (Sheller, 2018;Alam and Miller, 2019;Kita, 2019;Whyte et al, 2019;Blondin, 2021;McDonnell, 2021;Jessee, 2022;Neu and Fünfgeld, 2022;Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Dinko, 2022). Such complexities can compound as habitability declines over time in a changing climate, even as the ways in which habitability is measured and by who matters and is not uncontested (Duvat et al, 2021;Horton et al, 2021).…”