Why Climate Migration is Not Managed Retreat: Six Justifications.
Sponsor
Funding for this research was provided by Portland State University, USA (Faculty enhancement grant; Global Diversity Fund, and Vision 2025 Grant). We are grateful for the constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers. These comments significantly helped us improve the paper. We also appreciate Chris lower for providing additional edits to the final draft.
Published In
Global Environmental Change : Human and Policy Dimensions
Document Type
Citation
Publication Date
10-21-2020
Abstract
This perspective piece makes a case for a more rigorous treatment of managed retreat as a politically, legally, and economically distinct type of relocation that is separate from climate migration. We argue that the use of both concepts interchangeably obfuscates the problems around climate-induced mobilities and contributes to the inconsistencies in policy, plans, and actions taken by governments and organizations tasked with addressing them. This call for a disentanglement is not solely an academic exercise aimed at conceptual clarity, but an effort targeted at incentivizing researchers, practitioners, journalists, and advocates working on both issues to better serve their constituencies through alliance formation, resource mobilization, and the establishment of institutional pathways to climate justice. We offer a critical understanding of the distinctions between climate migration and managed retreat grounded in six orienting propositions. They include differential: causal mechanisms, legal protections, rights regimes and funding structures, discursive effects, implications for land use, and exposure to risks. We provide empirical examples from existing literature to contextualize our propositions while calling for a transformative justice approach to addressing both issues.
Rights
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102187
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/34354
Citation Details
Ajibade, I., Sullivan, M., & Haeffner, M. (2020). Why climate migration is not managed retreat: Six justifications. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102187