Struggles to Locate Mobile People at the Centre of the Migration and Climate Change Nexus

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the second nodal point in the policy-making discourse on migration and climate change, which is the people who are at the centre of the phenomenon analysed in the previous chapter. People are also central to this discourse, for without people whose mobilities are in some way being affected, the abstract phenomenon of the migration and climate change nexus would remain as such, an abstract phenomenon. However, this is not to say that an easily identifiable community of affected people exists or that the lives of those people who are perceived as being affected by the nexus can be slotted into existing systems for understanding and classifying people on the move. One commonality shared by the people at the centre of the migration and climate change nexus is the exceptionality that is created around them. The basis of this exceptionality being identified as movement reveals a sedentary bias underlying the conceptualisation of the migration and climate change nexus.