Environmental Change and Migration: Critically Examining the Explicit Debates, Implicit Theories, and Underlying Assumptions

About this workshop

This workshop aims to help masters and doctoral students to identify and contextualize the key debates on environmental change and migration as well as to critically examine the fundamental theories and epistemological questions underpinning environmental change and migration research. It will provide students with a syllabus of key texts on environmental change and migration from a variety of disciplines, lectures by leading researchers, and facilitated discussion sessions.

This postgraduate workshop is supported by The Hague Process on Migration and Refugees and the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

Panel 1: Contextualizing and conceptualizing environmental change and migration

Political and historical context in which environmental change and migration has emerged as a policy concern and research field

Andrew Baldwin, Durham University

Will the environmentally-induced migrant step forward? The emergence and consequences of migration categories

Oliver Bakewell, International Migration Institute

Normative debates: Understanding the ethical and rights-based perspectives on environmental change and migration

François Gemenne, IDDRI, Sciences Po

Chair: Roger Zetter

Panel 2: Theorizing Environmental Change and Migration

Forced or voluntary? Assessing issues of agency in environmental change and migration process

Ayla Bonfiglio, International Migration Institute and UNU-MERIT, University of Maastricht

Climate factors integrated into a theory of international migration determinants

Christopher Parsons, International Migration Institute

Environmental change and displacement: palliative humanitarianism or developmental challenge

Roger Zetter, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford

Chair: Oliver Bakewell

Panel 3: Testing Environmental Change and Migration and Advancing the Field

Re-examining our research questions: Grappling with causality and complexity, ontological analyses versus normative claims, and epistemological and ethical frameworks

Calum T.M. Nicholson, Department of Geography, Swansea University

Institutional and normative alternatives to study environmental change and migration

Alexander Betts, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford

Where to next? A case study from political ecology

Hein de Haas, International Migration Institute

Chair: François Gemenne