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The relationship between environmental change and human mobility is receiving growing attention in academia, policy and development programming. The focus has tended to distinguish between voluntary migration (for example ‘migration as adaptation’), displacement (for example ‘climate displacement’) or relocations of populations affected by catastrophic climate change (for example sea level rise). While these distinctions privilege movement, emerging evidence suggests people not able or willing to move may face greater challenges in the context of a changing environment, and that a policy focus on preventing migration may worsen these challenges (Black et al., 2011). Yet a lack of conceptual and empirical attention to immobility and its relationship to mobility means these dynamics are not well understood.
Existing research on immobility and environmental change tends to echo the negative framing seen in the wider migration studies literature, such as with recent references to ‘trapped populations’ (Foresight, 2011). While making immobility more visible, this generalised framing sets up mobility and immobility in binary, static terms. It denigrates immobility, even while immobility is normatively seen as standard, and therefore positions mobility as worthy of singling out for research. This hides immobility and mobility as process (Jónsson, 2011), as political (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Zickgraf, 2019) and as relational (Adey, 2006). It renders invisible potential connections and fluidity: for example, people who are assumed to be immobile within the borders of a state may be engaged in everyday mobilities, people ‘left behind’ may be closely connected to those who move. And equally, people on the move may experience immobility: for example, becoming ‘stuck’ during transit, incarcerated in refugee camps, or navigating visa refusals or border restrictions.
Taking as my starting point that mobility and immobility are co-constituted, my project aims to understand lived experiences of people described as ‘immobile’ or ‘trapped’ in landscapes of Western Kenya experiencing frequent flooding. This will be explored through life histories, community flood mapping and focus group discussions, thereby seeking to make an empirically grounded contribution to a literature which has to date been largely theorised at a conceptual level. I will aim to embed these situated experiences within the social and political structures governing im/mobilities, which are also tied to spatial and temporal dynamics frequently hidden from view in mainstream approaches to mobility and environmental change in the Global South.
That is, the ways in which people are understood as being mobile (or mobilised) at certain times and certain places, and immobile (or immobilised) at others. Atemporal analysis often categorises people as migrant or non-migrant at the point of data collection, often a disaster event (Zickgraf, 2021). This can hide precolonial, colonial and postcolonial im/mobilities, which in Kenya has involved policies aiming to fix certain populations in place, alter land access and embed problematic assumptions that people only move when forced (Brankamp and Daley, 2020). It also hides the ways im/mobilities feature throughout the life course, and how these may be differentiated – for example based on gender, age or livelihood dynamics.
It is with these initial reflections I begin to plan a period of fieldwork later in 2022.
References:
Adey, P. (2006) ‘If Mobility is Everything Then it is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities’, Mobilities, 1(1), pp. 75–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100500489080.
Black, R. et al. (2011) ‘Migration as adaptation’, Nature, 478(7370), pp. 447–449. https://doi.org/10.1038/478477a.
Brankamp, H. and Daley, P. (2020) ‘Laborers, Migrants, Refugees: Managing belonging, bodies, and mobility in (post)colonial Kenya and Tanzania’, Migration and Society, 3(1), pp. 113–129. https://doi.org/10.3167/arms.2020.030110.
Foresight (2011) Migration and global environmental change: future challenges and opportunities. Final Project Report. London: The Government Office for Science.
Glick Schiller, N. and Salazar, N.B. (2013) ‘Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(2), pp. 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.723253.
Jónsson, G. (2011) Non-migrant, sedentary, immobile, or ‘left behind’? No. 39. Oxford: International Migration Institute.
Zickgraf, C. (2019) ‘Keeping People in Place: Political Factors of (Im)mobility and Climate Change’, Social Sciences, 8(8), p. 228. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8080228.
Zickgraf, C. (2021) ‘Theorizing (im)mobility in the face of environmental change’, Regional Environmental Change, 21(4), p. 126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-021-01839-2.