Exploring mobility and resilience in the context of climatically driven environmental change: a case study of migration in Anhui Province, China

This thesis explores links between mobility and resilience in the context of climatically driven environmental change. Using two villages in Anhui Province, China as a comparative case study, this paper investigates the impact of two types of climatically driven environmental change (a flood and a drought) with a specific focus on the role of mobility. The study employs a novel conceptual framework that uses an adapted version of Leach et al’s (1999) ‘Environmental Entitlements Framework’ to understand the processes, characteristics and outputs that contribute to resilience at different levels of analysis. Through the use of this novel conceptual approach, issues of power and social heterogeneity are explored within a resilience framing, the lack of which is a common criticism of many existing resilience studies. The analysis reveals that, for both communities, those who elected to stay tended to exhibit more resilience than those who were obliged to stay, highlighting the important roles that immobility and choice play in relation to resilience. Significant tension was found between resilience and wellbeing; increases in levels of resilience did not always appear to correspond to increases in wellbeing. The research also reveals interesting inter and intra level interactions between individuals of the same household and between households and the village that threatens the very existence of the villages themselves. The thesis concludes by highlighting the importance of (im)mobility and choice as important influences on resilience, urging for a more critical and cautious use of the concept of resilience with regard to development initiatives and the highlights importance of drawing out interactions between and within different levels of analysis to aid understanding. Key words: Resilience, adaptation, migration, climate change, Chin

Exploring methodological approaches to assess climate change vulnerability and adaptation: reflections from using life history approaches

People in developing countries face multiple risks, and their response decisions sit at the complex and often opaque interface of climatic stressors, constrained resource access, and changing livelihoods, social structures, and personal aspirations. Many risk management studies use a well-established toolkit of methodologies—household surveys, focus group discussions, and semi-structured interviews. We argue that such methodological conservatism tends to neglect the dynamic and differentiated nature of livelihood decisions. Since different methodologies privilege different portrayals of risk and response, we highlight how plural methodological approaches can capture a broader range of perspectives and problematisations. In this paper, we draw on life history (LH) interviews across four countries (Kenya, Namibia, Ghana, and India) to offer one way of expanding current methodological approaches on vulnerability and adaptation. We argue that LHs offer four key ‘value additions’. First, LHs give insights into the multiple and interacting nature of drivers of response behaviour. Second, they highlight intra-household dynamics to demonstrate how people with differential power shape risk management decisions. Third, LHs support explorations of past decisions, present situations, and future aspirations, thus producing temporally nuanced enquiries. Fourth, they provide a powerful analytical lens to capture the interplay of motivations, aspirations, and values on livelihood choices and adaptation outcomes. By adding value in these four ways, LHs challenge assumptions about how and why people respond to multiple risks and offer a nuanced understanding of adaptation processes

Rural modernization and the remaking of the rural citizen in China:Village redevelopment, migration and precarity

The Chinese government's ambitious plans to modernize the countryside have significant impacts for rural populations. Upgrading or relocating villages is one component of this vision with profound implications for rural citizens. We use multiple social science research methods to investigate ongoing rural transformation in two villages designated for Village Redesign in Anhui Province, China. We show that the Village Redesign process is negatively impacting on the migration–development nexus and the resultant limbo deepens the precarity of high-mobility, translocal households who already experience secondary forms of citizenship and limited social protections. This study raises further questions about the ongoing transformation of rural China and questions the modernizing rural agenda of the Chinese state

Representing recovery: How the construction and contestation of needs and priorities can shape long-term outcomes for disaster-affected people

We contend that the representational aspects of recovery play an important but under-researched role in shaping long-term outcomes for disaster-affected populations. Ideas constructed around events, people and processes, and conveyed through discussion, texts and images, are seldom neutral and can be exclusionary in their effect. This review draws insights from literature across multiple disciplines to examine how the representation of needs, roles and approaches to recovery influences the support different social groups receive, their capacities to recover, and their rights and agency. It shows how these representations can be contested and challenged, often by disaster-affected people themselves, and calls for increased attention on how to move creatively towards more informed, inclusive and supportive recovery visions and processes

'Transformations towards sustainability':Emerging approaches, critical reflections, and a research agenda

Over the last two decades researchers have come to understand much about the global challenges confronting human society (e.g. climate change; biodiversity loss; water, energy and food insecurity; poverty and widening social inequality). However, the extent to which research and policy efforts are succeeding in steering human societies towards more sustainable and just futures is unclear. Attention is increasingly turning towards better understanding how to navigate processes of social and institutional transformation to bring about more desirable trajectories of change in various sectors of human society. A major knowledge gap concerns understanding how transformations towards sustainability are conceptualised, understood and analysed. Limited existing scholarship on this topic is fragmented, sometimes overly deterministic, and weak in its capacity to critically analyse transformation processes which are inherently political and contested. This paper aims to advance understanding of transformations towards sustainability, recognising it as both a normative and an analytical concept. We firstly review existing concepts of transformation in global environmental change literature, and the role of governance in relation to it. We then propose a framework for understanding and critically analysing transformations towards sustainability based on the existing ‘Earth System Governance’ framework (Biermann et al., 2009). We then outline a research agenda, and argue that transdisciplinary research approaches and a key role for early career researchers are vital for pursuing this agenda. Finally, we argue that critical reflexivity among global environmental change scholars, both individually and collectively, will be important for developing innovative research on transformations towards sustainability to meaningfully contribute to policy and action over time

Everyday mobility and changing livelihood trajectories: Implications for vulnerability and adaptation in dryland regions

Dryland regions are highly dynamic environments in which multiple pressures intersect, threatening livelihood security. Mobility is an integral feature in these environments and represents a key risk management strategy for people to respond to frequent livelihood shocks and stresses. Global environmental change scholarship has tended to articulate spatial and temporal change inadequately, portraying populations in a way that belies their socially differentiated and inherently mobile livelihoods. We explored the role of mobility as an ongoing, "everyday" adaptive response to changing environmental, economic, and social conditions. We draw on 21 Life History (LH) interviews to explore the drivers and outcomes of people's mobility behavior in drylands of Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, and India. We present the adaptation option space (AOS) as a novel theoretical development to explore livelihood trajectories. Within our cases, we found that mobility was ubiquitous and facilitated changes to and exchanges within people's risk profiles in three main ways: novelty (risks gained or lost), modification (risks attenuated or accentuated), and no change. Temporal analysis showed three broad trajectories in people's lives set within broader structural constraints: upward, downward, and stable, depending on people's abilities to manage their AOS. The analysis confirmed that the AOS was a useful heuristic to understand how people exert agency to respond to an array of converging risks while negotiating broader drivers of change. Moreover, the data demonstrated how compounding shocks had negative impacts on people, highlighting the value of temporally-sensitive approaches

Toward a climate mobilities research agenda: Intersectionality, immobility, and policy responses

Mobility is a key livelihood and risk management strategy, including in the context of climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced long standing concerns that migrant populations remain largely overlooked in economic development, adaptation to climate change, and spatial planning. We synthesize evidence across multiple studies that confirms the overwhelming preponderance of in-country and short distance rather than international migration in climate change hotspots in Asia and Africa. The emerging findings highlight the critical importance of addressing immobility and the intersecting social determinants that influence who can move and who cannot in development policy. This evidence suggests a more focused climate mobilities research agenda that includes understanding multiple drivers of mobility and multi-directional movement; intersecting social factors that determine mobility for some and immobility for others; and the implications for mobility and immobility under climate change and the COVID-19 recovery