Presentation short abstract

Planned relocation in Enseada da Baleia reveals how climate adaptation reproduces colonial and racial violence under the guise of environmental protection.

Presentation long abstract

This paper conceptualizes planned relocation related to climate change as a violent process rooted in colonialism, racial capitalism, and coloniality. Through the case of Enseada da Baleia, a caiçara community in Brazil, it examines how planned relocation reproduces historical structures of dispossession and control rather than constituting an exceptional or purely adaptive response to climatic events. The analysis moves beyond the crisis narrative of climate change to expose the enduring systems of oppression that organize the terms of relocation—deciding who moves, who stays, and under what conditions.

The paper argues that Enseada da Baleia’s planned relocation must be understood within the continuum of slow violence shaping the community’s material and symbolic existence. These quasi-events—such as the designation of Cardoso Island as a Conservation Unit, real estate speculation, and coastal erosion—operate as subtle mechanisms of forced displacement that sustain the colonial project under the guise of environmental protection and development.

By situating planned relocation within this broader historical and political context, the paper advances a critical understanding of climate-related relocation as both a symptom and an instrument of structural violence. It calls for approaches to climate adaptation that confront rather than obscure the unequal and racialized foundations of vulnerability and displacement.

Presentation short abstract

Using a Feminist Political Ecology approach, this paper examines ways sand extraction and development projects in Zambales produce environmental and climate (im)mobilities, revealing how power and human-nature entanglements shape vulnerability and displacement.

Presentation long abstract

(Im)mobilities in the context of environmental and climate change are deeply complex and context-specific, yet too often simplified in policy and research. In this paper, I use a case study in Zambales, in the Philippines, to explore ways a Feminist Political Ecology approach can bridge climate factors with other human-produced environmental factors to offer a more comprehensive understanding of climate mobility beyond climate, while emphasizing the intergenerational, embodied impacts on communities, and the differentiated gendered experiences of mobility.

Specifically, this paper highlights how development projects in Zambales surrounding sand ecologies and extraction, shaped by global structures of power, can create spaces of vulnerability that both contribute to and amplify environmental and climate change, including disasters. It also shows how climate and environmental change can become a scapegoat that justifies further development projects, which in turn increase climate change risks, such as landslides and floods during typhoons, thereby putting people at a higher risk of displacement and labeling them under the umbrella of “climate migration”.

Ultimately, this paper argues for a more situated and politicized understanding of climate mobility through the lens of Feminist Political Ecology, as the environment is always a co-production of natural and human processes, both of which are deeply entangled. As an apolitical and ahistorical analysis of climate mobility is at risk of reproducing the very vulnerabilities it seeks to address, I argue that this approach is not only relevant but also necessary.

Presentation short abstract

Seasonal mobility in Jacobabad, Pakistan, challenges claims of future ‘uninhabitability.’ We show how heat-related movement between overheated Jacobabad and cooler Quetta is adaptive yet unequal, shaped by colonial land-making, social networks, and resource constraint.

Presentation long abstract

Seasonal and temporary mobility has long been central to how people navigate environmental and livelihood pressures. Yet contemporary debates on extreme heat increasingly frame certain places ‘uninhabitable’ in the future, projecting mass displacement in ways that reproduce environmentally deterministic narratives. Drawing on ongoing research in Jacobabad, Pakistan, a city with the highest recorded levels of humid heat, we explore how residents have ties to a neighbouring cooler city, Quetta, and have an established movement there over the summer. The city of Jacobabad was established by the colonialist, British Brigadier-General John Jacob, in 1847, who developed irrigation in the area, making a landscape that was previously viewed as ‘uninhabitable’ become ‘habitable’. However, with growing concerns over extreme heat in Jacobabad, similar ‘uninhabitable’ labels re-emerge, yet local responses illustrate a far more complex politics of adaptation, access, and constraint. We show that temporary mobility provides an important, though unevenly accessible, strategy for coping with extreme heat. Familial networks, resources, and historical connections shape who can move and under what conditions. By situating heat-related mobility within colonial land-making, contemporary inequalities, and differentiated livelihood possibilities, we argue for a political ecology of migration that avoids both technocratic optimism about mobility as an adaptive fix and alarmist predictions of inevitable permanent displacement.

Presentation short abstract

Challenging reductionist framings of "climate-induced migration", this paper situates present mobility within longer histories. It argues that migration is a continuum of culturally embedded and structurally conditioned adaptive practice than a novel response to climate change.

Presentation long abstract

“Climate-induced migration” is increasingly portrayed as a novel and an emergent phenomenon, particularly in the Global South. Such framings often assume a linear, deterministic relationship between environmental change and human mobility, overlooking the historical, cultural and structural contexts within which mobility unfolds. Yet, current climate-migration narratives in Nepal rely on such deterministic framings. This paper challenges these narratives by situating contemporary climate-related mobility within longer histories and argues for migration to be understood as a continuum of culturally embedded and structurally and intersectionally conditioned practices, rather than a novel response to climate change. Historically, migration has been central to the Nepal Himalaya, shaped by a confluence of structural pressures and opportunities including state-making processes, food and livelihood insecurity, colonial legacies, economic liberalisation, civil war, disasters, and shifting socioeconomic aspirations. Migration is rarely attributable to a single factor, but rather reflects a dynamic interplay of socioeconomic, environmental, and political factors shaping how people navigate uncertainty. Drawing on a historical review and an ethnographic fieldwork in Lamjung and Khotang, findings reveal that while climate change is intensifying livelihood precarity, especially among rural agrarian communities, present day migration builds on and extends longer trajectories of movement shaped by poverty, agrarian change, cultural shifts, and broader developmental processes. Attending to how intersectional subjectivities mediate mobility opportunities and vulnerabilities highlights the wider structural and aspirational dimensions of migration. Such an analysis offers a more nuanced, relational, and dynamic understanding of migration as a persistent adaptive strategy during times of uncertainty in the Himalaya.

Presentation short abstract

My research in Suoi Bu, Vietnam, shows that domestic migration of the Hmong from highlands to lowlands is rooted in a government ban on swidden agriculture, market fluctuations, and new forms of debt, pushing Hmong households towards wet-rice cultivation and greater dependence on cash income.

Presentation long abstract

My research moves beyond conventional push and pull theory in migration studies to explore how structural changes, market fluctuations, and new forms of debt have driven Hmong households in Suoi Bu, Vietnam, into off-farm labor markets. Rather than simply identifying money as the main driving factor, the findings reveal that their labor migration from highlands to lowlands is associated with a government ban on swidden agriculture, their traditional livelihood practice. This ban has profoundly changed local ecology and the Hmong agricultural practices, pushing them towards wet rice cultivation and increasing dependence on modern inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanized tools. The village has undergone some transformative phases that reflect its gradual integration into capitalist markets: the shift from swidden to wet rice cultivation, and more recently, a transition from maize to cash crop cultivation. While swidden agriculture primarily required physical labor instead of monetary investment, wet rice, maize, and cash crop cultivation demand more crop varieties and chemical inputs. In addition, market fluctuations during the maize boom and new forms of debt, such as those incurred from house construction, have further increased reliance on cash income, making internal migration a necessary livelihood response. Research also shows that labor migration is considered an opportunity for youth to explore the lowlands and for Hmong women to gain financial autonomy. While a majority of participants viewed the transition towards labor migration as beneficial for household livelihoods, many also expressed concerns about rising divorce rates due to migration.

Presentation short abstract

This paper highlights how management of two sluice gates shapes the wider economy of the village, in turn shaping the need to go outside for work. Exploring how moments of uncertainty in these practises of managing saline water can open new imaginaries for both agriculture and labour migration.

Presentation long abstract

Building on recent political ecologies of coastal Bangladesh this paper highlights the connection between out migration and shrimp aquaculture through the stories of two sluice gates in neighbouring villages. One sluice gate was shut by a powerful local police officer, stopping the flow of salt water and stopping the cultivation of shrimp, while the other remains open and managed through a lease system. These sluice gates shape the economy of the two villages, and in turn whether people need to leave the village in search of work. Changes in the viability, legality, and management of the sluice gate in turn open new possibilities for the communities living around them, including whether there will be jobs available in the local area or if they will need to travel ‘outside’ for work. By drawing attention to the relationship between the sluice gate, economic relations of the village and labour this paper applies political ecological approaches to understanding why a culture of ‘outside work’ (Baire Kaj) has emerged in these villages, and how people imagine outside work changing in the future. This paper is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in coastal Bangladesh and is part of a broader project exploring how ‘outside work’ in Bangladesh is situated within the political economy of the agrarian and urban.

Presentation short abstract

Water-driven South–South farmer mobilities are pushing new irrigated frontiers across the Sahel–Maghreb. Drawing on cases from Morocco, Mali, and Mauritania, this paper explores how these movements reconfigure land and water access, labor dynamics, and local socio-ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

Across the Sahel–Maghreb region, (ground)water has become a central driver of agricultural expansion, reshaping land uses, labor dynamics, and mobility patterns. Since the 1980s, technological innovations, climate variability, and market incentives have facilitated a shift from surface-water irrigation to intensive groundwater extraction, contributing to the emergence of new agricultural frontiers in arid and semi-arid environments. This contribution examines these transformations through a multi-sited study conducted in Morocco, Mali, and Mauritania. Building on itinerant fieldwork combining interviews and observations, the study analyzes how farmers move in search of water, fertile soils, and labor, and how these movements reconfigure existing agrarian systems and livelihoods. Findings show that mobile farmers cultivate high-value crops such as watermelons, and vegetables using drip irrigation, imported technologies, and flexible labor arrangements. Their presence generates new flows of knowledge, capital, and labor, contributing to the formation of transnational agrarian networks linking Morocco, Mauritania, Mali and global markets. These mobilities are adaptive, non-permanent, and closely tied to fluctuating water availability and market conditions. However, these dynamics also produce significant socio-ecological tensions, including increased pressure on water resources, competition over land, restructuring of pastoral spaces, and rising land values.

Presentation short abstract

This paper will show how migration was fundamental to British colonial agricultural governance, dispossession, and racialised caste-making which produced landlord dominance and whose afterlives structure (often lower-caste) bonded labour and a complex web of (im)mobilities in Sindh, Pakistan today.

Presentation long abstract

Structures of legal violence have underpinned colonial and capitalist expansion, facilitating capital accumulation through extractivist regimes that dispossess communities while reordering human–environment relations on racialized terms. Across many colonial contexts, land reform, tenure reclassification, and juridical categories of personhood have functioned as structural mechanisms to dominate human and ecological mobilities; mechanisms that persist within contemporary neoliberal governance. These dynamics of dispossession, labour control, and mobility restriction form the backdrop for understanding bonded labour in Pakistan.

Bonded labour, a form of debt bondage, in Sindh, Pakistan in which landlord elites use exploitative strategies such as low wages and high interest rates for necessary loans is pervasive, particularly amongst lower castes (e.g. Dalits). This is a legacy of British colonial land and water management-based primitive accumulation which created a powerful class of landlords and a marginalised class of landless peasants made dependent. This unequal rubric of dispossession followed the ‘Science of Empire’, a racialising logic which categorised some (loyal) groups as having hereditary superiority over others, affording only upper caste groups powers of land, agricultural management, and (relatively) self-determined mobilities. This paper presents an expanded political ecology of migration showing that migration and displacement, particularly the (im)mobilities of lower-caste labour, were not consequences of but rather fundamental to the British racialisation of land and labour (Ranganathan, 2024). It will unpack how these (im)mobilities persist today, through detailing the configuration of bonded labour in webs of affecting (im)mobilities including literal bondage, caste discrimination, lack of land reforms, complicated legal systems, and intersectional subjectivities.

Presentation short abstract

This paper theorises political ecologies of migration through the concept of ‘border imperialism’. Doing so lets us link land, borders, and environmental issues and thereby re-politicise alarmist, state-centric, and neoliberal approaches to climate (im)mobilisation.

Presentation long abstract

Alarmist narratives project ‘climate migration’ as a problem to be solved, be it through charity, militarisation, neoliberal ‘resilience’ or legal justice. These narratives rest on a shared assumption that migration is pathological and nation-state borders are normal. The scholarly turn to ‘climate (im)mobilities’ demonstrates the empirical shortcomings of these simplistic narratives. However, the field lacks theoretical grounding, which limits its normative potential and renders its findings vulnerable to being co-opted into regulations privileging some migrants over others, thereby risking to further entrench borders.

This paper situates political ecologies of migration in relation to ‘border imperialism’ (Walia, 2013, 2021) which understands the structural and relational processes shaping contemporary migration patterns (borders) as a critical part of the organisation of global capitalism (imperialism). This critical framework can help migration scholars link land, borders, and environmental issues and trace the (im)mobilisation of people alongside the enclosure, accumulation, and exploitation of their resources.

By way of illustration, the paper applies this lens to the realities of migrant workers in the vast greenhouses of Almería, southern Spain, where a lack of legal migration pathways pushes people into precarious labour in extractive agriculture supplying northern European markets.

The paper suggests that ‘border imperialism’ can advance climate mobilities research in three ways, by (1) critiquing the state-centric assumptions underpinning dominant climate migration narratives, (2) connecting migration and environmental issues within a shared global history, challenging the field’s North-South divide, and (3) charting normative pathways to research and respond to (im)mobilities in environmental politics.

Presentation short abstract

The paper examines Rohingya displacement through land and labor rather than ethnic persecution alone. Based on oral histories and archival evidence, it shows how structural violence—subsistence-destroying taxation and forced labor—produces migration, revealing enduring patterns of dispossession.

Presentation long abstract

Between 1991 and 1992, 250,000 Rohingya were forcibly displaced from Rakhine State in Myanmar to refugee camps in Bangladesh. By 1997, approximately 230,000 had been repatriated to Myanmar. Drawing on oral history interviews with refugees who refused repatriation and on archival research, this paper illuminates the underlying causes of this displacement—causes that continue to shape patterns of Rohingya displacement, including the mass exodus of 2017.

First, drawing on property documents and tax receipts shared by informants, I demonstrate how a dramatic escalation in taxation compelled Rohingya farmers to flee to Bangladesh. The increased tax burden on harvests— payable as a percentage or quota of the harvest which the farmers are compelled to sell at a price fixed by the government—left farmers unable to feed their families, pushing them below subsistence levels. Second, intensified military mobilization along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border precipitated a surge in forced labor through the coolie system. The military conscripted Rohingya bodies to act as porters, forest clearers, and road builders, forcing them to construct the very infrastructure that enabled further militarization of the borderlands.

By centering the importance of land and labor, this paper attempts to move beyond narratives of forced displacement centered around ethnic persecution and communal violence. First, the paper seeks to answer how we might understand forced migration when proximate causes are not only spectacular violence but structural. Second, it shows how the making of forced displacement has enduring roots in agricultural surplus extraction and persistent modes of land and bodily dispossession.