Land Grabbing and Migration in a Changing Climate

Comparative Perspectives from Senegal and Cambodia

Sara Vigil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000546514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the links between environmental change, land grabbing, and migration, drawing on research conducted in Senegal and Cambodia.

While the impacts of environmental change on migration and of environmental discourses on land grabs have received increased attention, the role of both environmental and migration narratives in shaping migration by modifying access to natural resources has remained under-explored. Using a variegated geopolitical ecology framework and a comparative global ethnographic approach, this book analyses the power of mainstream adaptation and security frameworks and how they impact the lives of marginalised and vulnerable communities in Senegal and Cambodia. Findings across the cases show how environmental and migration narratives, linked to adaptation and security discourses, have been deployed advertently or inadvertently to justify land capture, leading to interventions that often increase, rather than alleviate, the very pressures that they intend to address. The interrelations between these issues are inherent to the tensions that exist, in different contexts and at different times, between capital accumulation and political legitimation. The findings of the book point to the urgency for researchers and policymakers to address the structural causes, and not the symptoms, of both environmental destruction and forced migration. It shows how acting upon environmental change, land grabs, and migration in isolated or binary manners can increase, rather than alleviate, pressures on those most socio-environmentally vulnerable.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners working on the topics of land and resource grabbing and environmental change and migration. The book will also be of interest to those analysing political ecology transitions in Africa and Asia, as well as to those interested in novel theoretical and methodological frameworks.

1Exploring variegated geopolitical ecologies

DOI: 10.4324/9781003193142-2

Introduction

Although environmental change, migration, and land grabs represent some of the most pressing and challenging socio-political issues of our time, the interlinkages between these issues have tended to be problematised, analysed, and acted upon – at best – in pairs. On the one hand, while research on climate change and migration has greatly advanced our understanding of the complex relationships between biophysical environmental changes and human (im)mobility, much less is known about how discourses, narratives and frames around environmental, climate change and migration modulate these impacts by modifying access to natural resources. On the other hand, while research on global land grabs has advanced our understanding of many of its drivers and impacts, and in doing so, has illuminated the increasing role of environmental and climate policies, the role of migration narratives in legitimising land grabs, as well as the impact of these land grabs on migration remains underexplored. In order to fill these gaps and to bridge the disciplines that deal with these phenomena, this book asks: Why and how do environmental change, land grabs and migration shape each other, both materially and discursively, and with what consequences?

The challenge is to build theoretical and methodological bridges that can allow us to make sense of the complex material and discursive interrelations that are at the basis of this puzzle. While different frames could be used to understand how these issues are interconnected, both security and adaptation frames have become pervasive in climate change and migration policy processes. On the one hand, migration is often conceptualised as either a driver and/or consequence of conflict and national insecurity or as an essential adaptation measure capable of promoting human security and to contributing to triple win solutions for migrants, origin, and host societies. On the other hand, arguments to legitimise the need for land intensive investments often use environmental security/adaptation narratives as well as narratives around employment creation to halt migration as key justifications. But what are the theoretical antecedents of these powerful ideas, where do they come from, and where do they fall short? In order to address this question, the chapter first conceptually analyses the interconnections between environmental change, land grabs, and migration as they relate to diverging security and/or adaptation frames. To achieve this, this chapter reviews these interconnections from the vantage point of neo-Malthusian security and of neoclassical adaptation frames juxtaposing them to a framework denominated variegated geopolitical ecology, which draws on political economy, political ecology, critical geopolitics, and political geography to historically embed and analyse the multi-scalar, discursive and material interactions at play. In order to empirically investigate the material and discursive interrelations between environmental and climate change,¹ migration, and land grabs, the chapter discusses the methodological approach and comparative perspective between Senegal and Cambodia that underpinned the research, as well as the data collection tools which made the findings possible.

Figure 1.1Exploring interrelations.

Environmental security and population bombs

Bulging populations and land stress may produce waves of environmental refugees that spill across borders with destabilizing effects on the recipient’s domestic order and on international stability.

(Homer-Dixon 1991, 77)

While the idea that environmental and national security are connected has a long history, the concept of ‘environmental security’ became increasingly popular after the Cold War when demographic and environmental factors entered national security agendas (Barnett 2001; Urdal 2005). The earliest frames of environmental security can be found in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War and Plato’s Republic. Both authors compared the security of societies that lived within their ‘natural’ limits, like Sparta, to those like Athens that relied heavily on imports (Floyd and Matthew 2013, 3). These ideas survived the passage of time and received a powerful translation in the famous Essay on the Principle of Population by the demographer Thomas Malthus. Malthus’ well-known thesis is that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to engender subsistence for man (Malthus 1872). Given that the population would theoretically grow at a geometric rate while that same population’s ability to produce resources would increase only at an arithmetic rate, the population will inevitably surpass the needs of their subsistence. Although migration could serve as a temporary fix to relieve pressure on the labour market, in the long run, the ‘principle of population’ would come into effect with higher wages and greater fertility, thereby filling the gap that had been created by the departing emigrants (O’Rourke 2015, 96). In terms of scarcity, this means that there is an absolute scarcity of natural resources that is ‘physical, real and inescapable’ (Scoones et al. 2019, 234). Following this thesis, neo-Malthusians argue that the finitude of natural resources places strict limits on population growth and on consumption. If these limits are exceeded, poverty, social breakdown, migration, and conflict are inevitable (Homer-Dixon 1995).

However, and despite Malthusian predictions, colonial administrators were primarily concerned about under-population, attributing it as the cause of stagnant economic growth (Collins 2002). It was not until the post-war period that the Malthusian fear of overpopulation gained traction and that national security concerns became fused with environmental ones (Baldwin 1997; Barnett 2001; McBrien 2016). These ideas were championed by authors such as the biologist Paul Ehrlich in his book The Population Bomb (1968) and by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in his widely influential essay The Tragedy of the Commons (1968). Hardin deployed the Malthusian argument of geometric population growth to argue that ‘a finite world can only support a finite population’ (Hardin 1968, 1243). Under the assumption that human beings act like selfish individual maximising agents, he used the metaphor of a selfish herder to underline that people would continue to over-exploit natural resources for their own self-interest. The result leads to a vicious circle of environmental degradation that Hardin labelled the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Ehrlich also incited the fear of overpopulation by stating that ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over’, that ‘hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death’, and that ‘overpopulation is now the dominant problem in all our personal, national, and international planning problems’ (Ehrlich 1968). These arguments around resource scarcity and the supposed dangers of population growth gained traction in the midst of the 1970s oil crisis when the concept of energy security, as it relates to the stable supply of oil, also entered the stage (Cherp and Jewell 2014; Scoones et al. 2019). It was also at this time that ideas about planetary limits, closely linked to population growth arguments, emerged in ecology and conservation, championed by Richard Falk’s This Endangered Planet (1972). These ideas entered the political scene through the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to growth report (Meadows et al. 1972) and were later reinforced in a Brundtland Commission Report titled Our Common Future, which stated that ‘The very possibility of development can be threatened by population growth’ (Brundtland et al. 1987, 2).

Migration as a security threat

First introduced in the 1970s by the founder of the Worldwatch Institute, Lester Brown, the term ‘environmental refugees’ became popular through a report authored by Essam El-Hinnawi for the United Nations Development Program in 1985, who defined them as ‘those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life’ (El-Hinnawi 1985, 4). Despite early critiques to the concept (Kibreab 1997) and its lack of legal recognition, the term gained traction amongst those drawing linkages between environmental and national security. In an essay entitled Environment and Security, the famous British ecologist Norman Myers deployed both population growth and refugee flows as a central component linking environmental destruction and national (in)security:

These two later problems (tropical deforestation and the spread of deserts), like certain others are closely connected to rapid population growth in the Third World, a problem related in turn to pervasive poverty and to associated issues of massive unemployment, overburdened cities, and refugees from environmental degradation.

(Myers 1989, 23)

These arguments were mirrored in an influential article by the security specialist Robert Kaplan, entitled The Coming Anarchy, where he argued that foreign policy would be shaped by: ‘surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly rising sea levels – developments that will prompt mass migrations and in turn incite group conflicts’ (Kaplan 1994, 58). According to these views, it is an imbalance between the supply and demand of natural resources – often driven by escalating population growth and migration – that creates scarcity and exacerbates socio-economic problems that can, in turn, escalate into conflicts, and hence, political insecurity.

Discourses drawing links between population growth, security, and migration, have continued to gain prominent political attention as concerns over both climate change and migration have skyrocketed. One dominant narrative exhibited in international politics and media portrays close connections between climate change and conflict, especially in the African Sahel, which is often presented as ‘ground zero’ for climate change. The Sahel has been globally described as a ‘perfect storm’ case, wherein the combination of climate change impacts and population growth is predicted to lead to land degradation, famine, and terrorism insurgencies if urgent action is not taken. In a neo-Malthusian fashion, these narratives start by introducing demographic realities and projections, directly followed by climate projections:

In 1950, the region contained 31 million people; today there are more than 100 million, and in 2050, there could be more than 300 million. New projections of climate change … foresee a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius above today’s already high temperatures by 2050 … The projections for 2100 are startling, with a population of 600 million in the Sahel and temperatures up to 8 degrees above today’s norms. It would be totally implausible to sustainably accommodate this scale of growth. Without immediate large-scale action, death rates from food shortages will rise as crops wither and livestock die and the largest involuntary migration in history could occur.

(Potts et al. 2013, 3)

Based on methodologically biased projections that couple demographic and climate scenarios, figures ranging from 150 million to 300 million people displaced by environmental factors by 2050 are often cited (see Gemenne 2011 for a critique).

When linked to violence, climate change is also believed to fuel extremism because people who are unable to provide for their families in contexts of extreme weather events and environmental degradation may become easy targets of extremist recruits who offer them employment and food. An example that is often offered is how the drying up of Lake Chad contributed to the growth of Boko Haram. As a climate and security specialist explained it: ‘Climate shocks and stresses are pushing many into extreme poverty. Joining an armed group is sometimes the only option available’ (Gerretsen 2019). The conflict in Dar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Preface: from co-development to land grabs
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Exploring variegated geopolitical ecologies
• 2 From colonialism to neoliberalism
• 3 Green and migration grabs
• 4 Expulsions and destruction
• 5 Self-fulfilling risks
• Conclusion
• Index