Migration and Development

In this analysis, migration and its relation with climate change and development are examined through Sen's (1999) capabilities framework for human mobility. Migration is a people-centric activity where one may want to reside in or relocate to a desired area. Discussions around the connection between climate change and migration are growing in academic and governance contexts. Scholars are increasingly recognising migration's role as a strategy for adaptation and development. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) suggests that there is no direct relation between climate changes and migration decisions. Viewing migration as merely adaptation can understate the varied causes of forced migration, which include sociology, economics, politics, and ecology. Addressing climate migration effectively requires considering political and economic processes and their interrelations.

It has been 25 years since Sen’s seminal book “Development as Freedom” was published. A lot has changed since then, also in terms of how we tend to perceive the relationship between migration and development. For one, and to paraphrase Sen, migrants have begun to be perceived as “responsible persons” who “chose to act one way rather than other”. To migrate, or to stay. This reasoning is reflected in the recent work of, among others, Hein de Haas (2021) and Kerilyn Schewel (2020), who perceive migration – or lack thereof – as a result of people’s aspirations both in terms of their right to move (de Haas) and to stay (Schewel). Importantly, as argued by the latter, a systematic neglect of the causes and consequences of immobility – i.e. of people’s staying preferences – obscures any efforts to understand why, when, and how people migrate. By developing the aspirations-capabilities frameworks to explore the determinants of (im)mobility, de Haas and Schewel have contributed a great deal to altering the status quo in migration research, which has often focused on the more easily quantifiable, economic factors underlying migration decision-making. Importantly, unlike most mainstream theories of migration, the aspirations-capabilities framework becomes even more relevant when acknowledging the highly gendered nature of migration.