Domestic Structures, Misalignment, and Defining the Climate Displacement Problem

Susan Sterett

doi:10.3390/socsci10110425

Abstract

This paper contrasts how climate reports describe displacement with how analyses of moving after disaster have described whether people move. The paper argues that domestic structures govern displacement, and are likely to continue to. Domestically, people have different legal statuses and access to resources, which shape the ability to move. Authoritative governance documents on climate change, including the United States National Climate Assessment, argue that climate change will lead to increasing numbers of displaced people. On the other hand, demographers and economists who study where people move to after disaster have argued that climate reports overstate the risk of mass displacement, based in what has happened after past disasters. Domestic governance processes influence resettlement, and they can change. Studies of whether people move after disaster do not take into account how changes in insurance rates or other rules shaping where people live could reshape resettlement. On the other hand, analyses of governing potential climate displacement draw on international agreements and documents. has often centered on islands advocates argue will disappear, not the changing habitability of places that also depends on the resources people have. The image of disappearing islands misdirects from the risks of climate displacement in wealthier countries, where some people have extensive resources and others do not. This paper argues that the risk of displacement requires turning to follow the domestic governance processes that shape people’s decisions now. This approach fits with calls to work from people’s claims up to governance processes, rather than from processes downward.

Highlights

Integrating Decisions with Ordinary Domestic Law1 In spring 2021, my immediate family gathered where my mother lives, in SonomaCounty, California
The influx of European Americans in the 1850s led to land dispossession and people being forced onto reservations so the United States government could grant homestead rights to new settlers (Theodoratus 1974)
According to the Census, as of 2019, 494,336 people lived in the county (United States Census n.d.)

Summary

Introduction

Integrating Decisions with Ordinary Domestic Law In spring 2021, my immediate family gathered where my mother lives, in Sonoma. Governance includes turning from the trope of the disappearing island and toward the political and governance choices within the much more widespread experience of increasingly intense disaster, like people in Sonoma County, California have lived through. To note disagreement and to point to the institutions that shape choices, the paper draws upon demographers’ analyses of who has moved in the United States after disaster These analyses offer opportunities to note the structures that often remain out of view. In the absence of the planned mass relocation climate governance documents imagine, local, national, and private rules shape where people live while facing climate-related disasters that do not completely obliterate land. A polycentric lens requires turning from global instruments and planning to the claims people make and the structures that shape them

Learning from Claims

Anticipating Displacement and Measuring Movement

Governance

Findings

Conclusions