Environmental Change, Adaptation and Migration

Bringing in the Region

Felicitas Hillmann, Marie Pahl, Birte Rafflenbeul, Harald Sterly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137538901
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137538918
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Biological Sciences

The contributors present empirical and theoretical insights on current debates on environmental change, adaptation and migration. While focusing on countries subject to environmental degradation, it calls for a regional perspective that recognises local actors and a systematic link between development studies and migration research.

Part I

Framing the Debate

1

Climate Mobilities from a Human Geography Perspective: Considering the Spatial Dimensions of Climate Change

Johannes Herbeck

Introduction: Climate change – Between global trend and local manifestation

At first glance, climate change seems to be in line with paradigm shifts in the social sciences which appeared in the final two decades of the 20th century in the context of the multiple forms and meanings of economic, social and cultural globalisation. Similar to globalisation, climate change appears as a phenomenon that has to be observed and analysed on a global scale, because of its global causes and its border-transcending effects. Only a global observation, one might argue, allows the identification of long-term and uni-directional trends in the complex and multiple changes in local weather all around the globe. The same is true for the attribution of “global” climate change to anthropogenic activities, which has been a central field of enquiry for many years.

The past few decades of climate change research have generated abundant and geographically widespread techniques, institutions and mechanisms of knowledge production. Similarly, myriads of initiatives and political fora have been developed that understand climate change as a border-crossing challenge necessitating global answers and solutions. With the foundation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in the mid-1980s, fundamental mechanisms of international climate sciences have been codified in their specific shape (Flitner, 2013). The foundation of the IPCC has reified the dominance of natural sciences in defining the methodological approaches, indicators and measuring systems in climate research. At the same time, at least three fundamental principles of not only the scientific but also the political treatment of climate change have been powerfully defined (confer Hulme, 2008, p.6): the imagination of the atmosphere as a globalised and finite depository of global greenhouse gas emissions, the goal of a stabilised global climate as the fundamental focus of international politics and the definition of mitigation and adaptation as the two pillars of climate politics.

The inscribed global character of climate change and the initiatives designed for its combat seem to suggest a similarly homogenising impact that has led O‘Brien (1992) to augur the end of geography in the face of the accelerating economic globalisation in the 1990s. While societies all around the globe are argued to be united in a world risk society (Beck, 1986) that is affected by climatic and accompanying social and economic transformations, spatial differences seem to recede into the background. This also reflects a transition in social theories (and especially in human geography) that has tried to replace container topographies strongly related to national territories by a newly defined transnational, cosmopolitical (confer, e.g., Beck and Grande, 2004) global society. These new explanations were also a reaction to a perceived increase of border-transcending societal challenges and growing capacities to approach those problems that have evolved beyond the nation state and across national boundaries. The growing importance of trans-and international organisations exemplifies this trend.

In social sciences, these developments led to attempts to overcome the widespread methodological nationalism (Basch et al., 1994), which characterised large parts of the political and other social sciences until the end of the 20th century. Simultaneously, the humanities experienced a cultural turn, when pioneers like Raymond Williams (1971), Edward Said (1978), Stuart Hall (1990) and Homi Bhabha (1994) started to question the essentialist and primordial conceptualisation of individual and collective identities in cultural studies and thereby also challenged the connected imaginative geographies (Said, 1978) of territorially bound cultures. The imagination of clearly demarcated territories of a seemingly timeless ethnos or national community has lost its explanatory power under the influence of post-structuralist theories – and therewith also the seemingly natural national world order.

While climate change seems to confirm the global character of societal problems and the border-crossing political arrangements that are needed to counteract the threats, there is no doubt that climate change will have highly differentiated impacts. The global as borderless "space of flows" (Castells, 1996) detached from local conditions is reaching its limits in the concrete, local manifestation of global climate change. Through its relational character, climate change even mediates between individual vulnerable bodies and the question of planetary survival (Blok, 2010, p.897). The expected rise in temperature, variations of precipitation and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events (especially storms, heavy rain incidents and periods of drought) occur within certain geographic boundaries and are individually perceivable and spatially limited. Research not only into the societal impacts but also into the structural causes and preconditions of climate change has to be aware of the interplay between global functioning and local manifestation of those processes and conditions. This interplay (or tension) is at least partially explained by the way in which established climate sciences produce knowledge. Hulme (2008) describes the losses of information and meaning of climate data on its journey from highly localised data collection to aggregated climate models on global or regional scales:

Weather is first captured locally and quantified, then transported and aggregated into regional and global indicators. These indicators are abstracted and simulated in models before being delivered back to their starting places (locales) in new predictive and sterilised forms (...). Through this circuitry, weather – and its collective noun climate – becomes detached from its original human and cultural setting.

(Hulme, 2008, p.7)

It is clear that intrinsically the scale-transcending forms of data collection and climate modelling are reducing climate data to purely scientific items, detaching them from cultural dimensions of perceiving and giving meaning to weather phenomena. This purification (Latour, 1993) of climate information is closely linked to spatial practices and data transfers across scales and spaces, which are part of a specific spatiality of modern climate sciences.

Besides this epistemological question, climate change will have highly differentiated effects, both in temporal and in spatial terms. In this context, natural and social climate sciences are confronted with questions such as the following: how far are single events influenced by long-term climate trends? Which places (or wider geographic units) are especially affected by short- and long-term changes in climate and weather? In which ways are local populations able to adapt to changes in local weather?

In the natural sciences, the first of those questions has led to new fields of research that try to evaluate the extent to which long-term climate trends contribute to single extreme events (confer, e.g., Peterson et al., 2013). Similarly, scholars try to evaluate the influence of regional or local emissions on global changes (confer, e.g., Bindoff et al., 2013). Those different variants of attribution are still in their infancy. Anyhow, in a primarily temporal perspective, first approaches have emerged to attribute the globalism of climate change to its local manifestations, especially in the form of single extreme events. At the same time, both variants also show that the translation of global changes to sub-global spatial units (and the other way around) faces difficulties (confer Bindoff et al., 2013; Peterson et al., 2013).

In the social sciences, and especially in human geography, this temporal perspective is outweighed by a spatial focus. In this perspective, climate change cannot be seen as generally global, but it has to be understood as a spatially highly differentiated and fragmented process (Dietz and Vogelpohl, 2005, p.8). Dietz and Vogelpohl point out that in their view two spatial categories play central roles in human geography research on climate change: place and scale.

Places and regions – Central spatial categories in climate change research

Place does have a high relevance, both in broader debates on environmental changes and in the more specific climate change literature. Human geography has a long tradition of engagement with this spatial category, which, on closer inspection, is a complex and elusive notion. In general terms, place can be understood as a spatial unit "of any size or configuration" (Henderson, 2009, p.539), although it is more common to associate it with a small-scale, local level of observation.

Referring to John Agnew (Agnew, 1987), Castree (2009, pp.155ff.) describes three meanings of place that also represent a temporal succession in human geographical thought. In its most simple and original meaning, place is conceived of as a point on the earth's surface. Being the basis of the regional geography of the early 20th century, place in this understanding has been the central category to describe spatial differences and to deliver all-encompassing descriptions of local characteristics. As a result, geography's self-conception as a jack of all trades generated mainly descriptive accounts that culminated in the idea of global space as a mosaic of distinguishable, discrete places. This notion of place was contested from early on and led to a renunciation of the category in the mid-20th century, when the paradigm of a scientific human geography established deductive reasoning and quantitative methods to explain spatial patterns. Place as an important category was re-introduced in the 1970s in the context of a humanistic and Marxist critique of scientific geography: humanistic geographers like David Ley and Graham Rowles (confer, Ley, 1974; Rowles, 1978) proposed a new understanding of place as a sense ofplace, with which they stressed the centrality of the individual perception of and a sense of belonging to places. Place was seen not as a spatial unit that could objectively be described in its uniqueness but as a relevant scale for the everyday life of its inhabitants.

the aim was to recover people‘s varying sense of place [... ]: that is, how different individuals and groups, within and between places, both interpret and develop meaningful attachments to those specific areas where they live their lives.

(Castree, 2009, p.158)

This re-discovery of place was not only widely appreciated but also criticised, among others, by a group of Marxist geographers led by David Harvey: from their perspective, the focus on the individual perception of a sense of place also narrowed the view and overlooked the crucial influence of a globally organised capitalistic economy on local socio-economic conditions (confer, e.g., Harvey, 1982). The main question then was the embeddedness of local actions and decisions in wider structures that appear and are determined beyond the borders of places.

Contemporary human geographers [... ] have proposed a more relational and political conception of place, emphasising the connections between places in an increasingly networked and globalised world.

(Devine-Wright, 2013, p.62)

The dualism of structure and agency was the starting point of the “second phase in human geography‘s rediscovery of place” (Castree, 2009, p.158). While Massey (1984) focused on the spatial impacts of global processes (like increasing economic competition), proposing a compromise between place-based humanistic geography and its Marxist critique, authors like Gregory and Pred worked on a spatial interpretation of Anthony Giddens‘s structuration theory. Their main postulate was the mutual interference of structure and agency at distinct places (Castree, 2009, p.159).

Out of those debates, the third understanding of place as locale developed, with a clear focus on a scale of everyday life. In this understanding, locale is understood as a

scale in which people's daily life was typically lived. It was at once the objective arena for everyday action and face-to-face interaction and the subjective setting in which people developed and expressed themselves emotionally. It was at once intensely local and yet insistently non-local to the extent that outside "forces" intruded into the objective and subjective aspects of local life in an interdependent world.

(Castree, 2009, p.160)

With this step, place was re-conceptualised again, resulting in the identification of multiple globalities perceived at different places, where global structures are adopted and interpreted actively. The objective features of places and the subjective interpretation of those features are seen as appearing simultaneously and providing the basis of the individual sphere of everyday life. This implies the centrality of the connections between places and other large-scale spatial units, which has been subsumed under the notion of a relational understanding of place:

[A] relational reading of place [... ] works with the ontology of flow, connectivity and multiple geographical expression, to imagine the geography of cities and regions through their plural spatial connections.

(Amin, 2004, p.34)

Places (and regions) are then seen as “sites of heterogeneity” (Amin, 2004, p.38) that stand in constant connection with other places. Those multiple links are constitutive elements of the conceptualisation of place that are also highly relevant in climate change and globalisation debates. The relational readings of space have been connected with new options for systems of global solidarity (confer, e.g., Popke, 2007); this is further debated in the climate change discourse under the notion of climate justice (confer Westra, 2009; Parks and Roberts, 2010).

With regard to climate change, place in a relational understanding has been picked up, for example, in a seminal work by Wilbanks and Kates (1999), in which they try to evaluate the complex interrelations between a global level of change and locales or places. They argue that global change impacts local conditions while being shaped by decisions and actions taken on the ground. As a result, global change research is concentrating on evaluating either (and mainly) the local impact of global change or the contribution of local action to different large-scale processes. In doing so, most research is not sensitive to the importance of scale for global change research. Local agency and knowledge for explaining changes, for exampl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: (Re-)locating the Nexus of Migration, Environmental Change and Adaptation
• Part I: Framing the Debate
• Part II: Understanding Regional Vulnerabilities
• Part III: Extreme Regional Situations: Bangladesh
• Part IV: Extreme Regional Situations: Ghana
• Part V: Bringing Things Together: Conclusions
• Index