Climate-Induced Migration and Displacement, and the Normative Architecture of Adaptation and Migration Governance

Recent work in the social scientific literature has sought to understand climate-induced migration and displacement (CMD) as an adaptive response to the impacts of climate change (Black et al., 2011; McLeman and Hunter, 2010; McLeman and Smit, 2006). The structures of governance appropriate for responding to CMD, however, remain under-elaborated, despite calls for clear principles for resettling towns and villages (e.g. López-Carr and Marter-Kenyon, 2015) and proposals for global protocols for international CMD (e.g. Biermann and Boas, 2010). In this paper, I explore what taking seriously the empirical complexities of CMD requires of us when thinking about the appropriate institutional structures for managing CMD. I argue that a dedicated institutional structure for CMD, whilst it may be initially appealing in that it accounts for the distinctive responsibilities for CMD, is both practically unworkable and morally unattractive. This, I argue, need not mean abandoning questions of responsibility which are distinctive in the case of CMD. Rather, this motivates a distinction between first-order responses to CMD, and a second-order distributive principle for accounting for the costs of such responses, which can be sensitive to questions of responsibility. In thinking about our first-order responses to CMD, I argue that we ought to disaggregate climate-induced migration and displacement. Doing so reveals that different cases of CMD can be accommodated into different aspects of the global normative architecture, including adaptation planning and internal displacement governance at the national and sub-national level, and the norms of a revised refugee regime at the international level. I then sketch what a revised version of such a normative architecture would look like for different cases of CMD. At the national and sub-national level, this includes exploring ways in which international institutions might be involved adaptation planning for CMD without becoming ‘managerial’ or ‘technocratic’. At the international level, this includes exploring the relative importance of factors such as the choice of those displaced, the ‘integrative capacity’ of states (Gibney, 2004), family ties, shared history, and cultural and linguistic similarity in making decisions about where those affected by CMD might be resettled, either temporarily or permanently.