West Africa sees major activity in the development of migration policies, promoted by international organisations, funded by governments mainly of Europe. Policy development is couched in terms of 'beneficiary-ownership', stressing the participation of West African governments. This is problematised as playing down the influence of European and international organisations. We argue that policy-making on migration in West Africa is better understood through the lens of 'subjectional diplomacy', a one-sided yet complex relationship between national and international actors that consolidates particular discourses of the 'problem' of migration. We find interview and documentary evidence from NGOs and governmental actors across Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea as well as ECOWAS Headquarters and international governmental organisations in Abuja that the logic of beneficiary-ownership is not symmetric. We show how the IOM holds 'redemptive' knowledge that turns the civilising mission of old into a professionalising mission embedding neo-colonial relations.

Migration is one way in which rural households can seek to reduce their vulnerability to climate change. However, migration also carries risks and costs, such that vulnerability may not be reduced. This article constructs an index of rural households' vulnerability to extreme weather events, in order to explore how key components of vulnerability relate to migration. Applied to case studies in China and India, the study finds that the effect of remittances is non-linear. Although overall, in Assam, few differences were found in the vulnerability of households that did and did not receive remittances, in Yunnan, remittance-recipient households were found to have less adaptive capacity in response to drought. However, those who had received remittances over longer periods were found to have improved adaptive capacity in both case studies, and in Yunnan, their exposure to such events was also lower. Meanwhile in Assam, longer distance migration was associated with reduced exposure to flooding and with specific forms of adaptation. The vulnerability index developed has capacity to be used in assessments of effects of migration on vulnerability elsewhere.

Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

For the countries of the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region, the importance of migration continues to be significant for livelihoods. Migration governance, therefore, is a critical priority (well-established). This chapter focuses on labour migration in the eight HKH countries. It explores the countries' overall migration experience and, where possible, highlights findings specific to mountain areas of the HKH.

This chapter analyses the main determinants of migration from our three Sub-Saharan countries to Europe, and the main determinants of return. We focus on the roles played by education, economic resources and networks for both decisions. In the case of return, we also pay also attention to the roles of visits, remittances and reasons for initial migration. The results suggest a clear positive selection in socioeconomic terms both in migration to Europe and return to origin, which partly answers the widespread concern about a potential brain drain. In addition, our findings confirm the crucial role of networks in facilitating migration to Europe and, in particular, the importance of couple reunification. However, the results for return show that bringing the partner or oen or more children to Europe does not automatically exclude a subsequent return to the country of origin, as is commonly assumed. This finding can probably be explained by transnational family arrangements or the duration of separation following the initial migration to Europe, which tends to be lengthier than expected for economic migrants. Finally, our results also highlight the internal diversity within the populations of Sub-Saharan migrants to Europe, which adds to the difficulty of designing policies to manage migration in a way that maximises the benefit to all parties involved.

Migration is clearly a major issue across Africa. Indeed, migration both within countries and across borders can be regarded as having been an integral part of labour markets and livelihoods across much of the continent for at least the last century. In practice, however, the link between migration and poverty is often viewed rather more negatively. It is assumed across much of the continent that it is poverty that forces poor people to migrate, rather than migration being a potential route out of poverty. Internal migration in Ghana is primarily from north to south, with inmigrants representing more than 40% of the population in the Greater Accra, Volta and Western regions. Patterns of internal migration appear to have been affected by economic crisis and structural adjustment, with some arguing that a long trend of urbanization across the continent has been stopped or even reversed.

Refugees, Environment and Development is concerned with the complex interrelationships between forced migration, natural resource management and 'sustainable development'. The book challenges the growing rhetoric that refugees 'cause' environmental degradation, and that environmental decline is promoting a new wave of 'environmental refugees'. Drawing on examples from Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as detailed case studies of the Rwandan emergency of 1994-96, and lesser known refugee movements to Guinea and Senegal in West Africa, the book argues against a neo-Malthusian view of the relationship between population, environment and migration. The author explores alternative approaches to the dynamic processes of social and environmental change in refugee situations. This is an ideal text for undergraduate and postgraduate students concerned with environment, development and migration studies, as well as policy-makers and practitioners in the field.

This chapter, 'Situating migration in planned and autonomous adaptation practices to climate change in Bangladesh', highlights policy discourse of Bangladesh viewing migration as a negative outcome of climate change. Such understanding led almost all the actors, that is, the Government of Bangladesh, its international development partners and also the non-governmental organisations, to concentrate on infrastructure interventions and local-level livelihood adaptation programmes to reduce the need for migration. This paper demonstrates that contrary to planned adaptation programmes, the autonomous adaptation practices of affected households have integrated different forms migration as one of the many adaptation strategies. This paper uses both primary and secondary data from three regions, all hotspots of environmental and hazards of climate change. Chapai Nawabganj suffers from drought, Satkhira experiences cyclones and saline intrusion and Munshiganj faces floods and riverbank erosion, which are also both common in the previous two areas. It establishes that adaptation outcome of migration is context specific and under some social, economic, demographic and policy environment, migration leads to adaptation while in some other situation it leads to maladaptation.

Recent research into migration in Bangladesh has highlighted that people migrate for better livelihoods, not necessarily in response to climatic stresses and shocks. If facilitated appropriately, internal and international migration can help build adaptive capacity to future environmental and climatic hazards. In this framing, migration happens in the context of a growing city-centred economy that promotes remittances to villages. However, a textual analysis of current and recent policies concerning climate change, development and poverty alleviation, and disaster management shows that the economic and adaptive roles of internal migration are often not included in policy framing. We argue that if migration works as a positive step towards adaptation, then the key challenge is to align the policies with this new understanding.