Governing Mobility Across Messy Policy Space: Planned Relocation as a Strategy of Climate Change Adaptation from UNHCR to Fiji

Abstract

Climate change is increasingly understood as a key factor in decisions to migrate, with an estimated 26 million people displaced annually since 2008 due to ‘natural’ weather-related disasters alone. With the potential to exacerbate underlying social, economic, and political vulnerabilities, climate change is expected to have the greatest impact upon internal displacement within developing regions of the world. In Fiji, as many as 45 communities are thought to require relocation over the next 5-10 years due to the combined impacts of slow and sudden-onset climate change. In response to this, international protection organisations — such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) — are working to establish ‘best practice’ consensus building guidelines to protect the rights of climate migrants, to enhance their self-determination, and to improve their development opportunities. Through a discursive analysis of rights-based ‘Guidance on Planned Relocation’ (UNHCR, 2015), and interviews with key organisations responsible for carrying out community relocations in Fiji, this research explores the way in which planned relocation has emerged as an ‘adaptive’ and ‘voluntary’ solution to forced climate-induced displacement. Adopting an analytical framework informed by a Foucauldian theory of governmentality, this thesis is able to comment on the political effects of these narratives. It suggests that planned relocation may become a new way of governing mobility, of transforming ‘at risk’ populations, and of concealing global accountability. At the same time, engagement with the value-based challenges of implementation in Fiji suggests that ‘best practice’ policy solutions are likely to be re-shaped as they travel across diverse sociocultural contexts. In this way, this thesis examines how gaps between policy and practice might create a space for discursive resistance and alternative possibilities for action. This involves an attempt at envisioning new ways of framing the ‘problem’ of climateinduced migration and its ‘solution’.