Abstract:
Background. Climate change is increasingly recognised as a key factor in decisions to migrate, with more than 24 million people displaced annually between 2008 and 2018 due to climate-related hazards, within and across borders, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2019). Planned relocation in response to climate change has become a hotly debated issue in small island countries in the South Pacific that are particularly prone to both slow-onset and sudden climate-related hazards. In Fiji, as many as 45 communities are expected to be relocated in response to various climatic hazards over the next 5-10 years.
Material and methods. This paper provides an analysis of rights-based guidelines on planned relocation as issued by the United Nations Refugee Agency as well as Fiji’s planned relocation guidelines to explore how relocation has been increasingly framed as a ‘voluntary’ form of climate change adaptation in international and national policy spaces. Through a comparison of these global and national ‘best practice’ guidelines with implementation realities in Fiji, this research examines the ways in which policy solutions transform as they travel across socially and culturally diverse spaces.
Results. The findings from this study highlight the challenges of translating ‘best practice’ across policy space and the need for more value-inclusive approaches towards understanding migration in the context of climate change. The results scrutinise the notion of ‘voluntary relocation’ in the face of increasingly frequent climatic hazards, due to (1) the differences across and within communities in conceptualising various types of risk, (2) the potentially adverse impact of planned relocation on people’s livelihood opportunities and attachment to place, and (3) the top-down nature of relocation practice.
Conclusion. The findings call for opening space for new ways of framing the ‘problem’ of climate-induced migration and its ‘solution’.