‘Environmental Refugees’?: A Critical Perspective on the Normative Discourse

Abstract

Migration induced by climate change or other environmental factors has been constructed in recent years as a challenge for international governance. My paper develops a critical perspective on the governance proposals relating to environmental migration. A first section relates to the impossibility of identifying environmental or climate ‘refugees’ (or ‘migrants’) as a workable legal category because of the complex and indirect causation of migration: often, environmental factors are only one in a cluster of causes. Considering that governance may do without a legally enforceable definition of individual ‘environmental migrants’, the second section argues that the ethical arguments used to justify environmental migration governance proposals on the basis of distributive or corrective justice fail to single out environmental migration as a specific normative issue. Solidarity-based narratives, for instance, would justify a protection of all forced migrants, rather than of the sole climate migrants. Lastly, a third section discusses the phenomenon through which environmental and climate migration were suddenly discovered as a global, normative issue. I argue that the ‘exceptionalization’ of environmental migration should be understood in the dialectic of domination and emancipation.