The bordering and rebordering of climate mobilities: towards a plurality of relations

Abstract

The relation between climate change and migration is subject to fast growing attention in scientific, policy, and public discourse. It is also subject to numerous representations and containment measures that carve out a new form of migration; one that includes visions of which populations deserve protection, should be stopped, or made mobile, and what areas are worth saving. This article interrogates these processes of bordering associated with climate mobilities research and policymaking, whilst also exploring how border-mobility relations and associated processes of bordering might be changed or rethought in a changing climate. Drawing on empirical examples from different world contexts—ranging from the Pacific to Southern Europe, we centre on the plural and contested ways in which borders in relation to climate mobilities manifest themselves in both geopolitical, conceptual, and cognitive terms, and in doing so build on, but also move beyond, literature examining the securitisation and exclusionary effect of borders vis-à-vis climate mobilities. We signal how a critical understanding of bordering further exposes classifications of so-called internal or international climate migration, of the un/deserving migrant, of the environmental un/privileged; and demonstrate how climate im/mobilities themselves feed into, resist, reshape, or even reimagine processes of (re)bordering.