Environmental Migrant - Conceptual Problems and Criticism

Conceptual Problems and Criticism

Much of the literature produced on 'environmental migration' assumes the nexus to be self-evident. The category is both emotive and commonsensical, and therefore has widespread currency in the media and among policy makers, non-social scientists and neo-Malthusianist social scientists. However, there is no evidence that the concept can be used to achieve generalisable truths. In brief, this is because the degree to which any given environmental factor is meaningful at the societal level - let alone to any specific aspect of human activity, such as migration - is entirely conditional on socio-economic and political contingencies. In other words, it is impossible to isolate a single environmental factor as an independent variable from which to deduce its impact on a particular (or general) form of social outcome in any way that will be generalisably useful; the relationship will be different depending on circumstance. In that "economic, social, institutional and political factors, combined with other harmful processes and events such as civil war and poverty were all identified to be the principal root cause behind population displacements- not environmental change alone". There has been little work that has bolstered the conceptual integrity of the concept. The concept lacks an agreed definition, and as a consequence, also lacks clear-cut evidence. Predictive models have therefore proved elusive, despite high-profile 'scoping studies', leading to a wide range of estimates, such as that conducted by the European Commission funded EACH-FOR project. Research conducted in areas of 'environmental degradation' which attempted to demonstrated a statistically significant correlation between migration and environmental degradation (including climate change) have so far lacked falsifiability, and have been marked by an absence of counterfactual evidence that has made it impossible to draw any generalisable conclusions from the findings.