Displacement Ecologies: An alternative conceptual framework for navigating how to reorient to a changing world

Abstract

This paper has several goals: first to outline a “Displacement Ecologies” analytical framework as an alternative lens to the dominant framings of displacement, as such advocating for more holistic and relational understandings of the experience of displacement. Second, we seek to illustrate how understanding phenomena such as placemaking or adaptation through a DE lens can be useful in supporting communities and individuals facing the compounding impacts of climate change and displacement. Third, to open discussion on how pushing beyond the cartesian dualisms of nature-human viewpoints in understandings of displacement can help people globally to reorient to the realities of a changing world. To achieve these aims, the paper first provides an overview of the complex and intertangled notions of mobility, migration, and displacement highlighting the challenges of extrapolating one from the other. Following, the DE analytical framework is presented and situated in the theoretical and practical knowledge it arose from. We then continue to provide an exemplification of how the DE lens can be applied to understand the experience of life in displacement generally, as well as specific phenomenon that tend to emerge in displacement contexts, using case examples. These examples are tied together highlighting how the DE lens can be useful for researchers in understanding how displaced populations can be supported in reorienting and adapting to future hazards faced in the experience of displacement. The paper closes with reflections on the limitations of the framework as well as how it could be further refined and applied to support communities which may need to relocate or otherwise reorient to the realities of the fluid, transforming world we all inhabit in the post-Holocene era of climate change.