Governing International Climate Change-Induced Migration: The Chaos and the Dancing Star

Abstract

Many authors have recently put forward that no international legal regime offers an sufficient protection to those displaced as a result of climate change, and that such a regime is needed. This paper argues that governing international climate change-induced migration requires to overcome three fundamental challenges: reconciling individual fundamental rights with state sovereignty, the complexity of the environmental inducement to migration with a somewhat simplified legal framework, and equity consideration with unequal diplomatic influence. Furthermore, it identifies alternatives narratives, actions and actors which could participate in the invention of a necessarily new governance model. Thus, it shows that expanding or replicating the Refugee Convention to 'environmental refugees' is not possible, nor desirable: new forms of international governance must be invented.