Property rights and climate migration: Adaptive governance in the South Pacific

Abstract

How would a polycentric property system react to mass movements of people caused by escalating climate change? Drawing on multidisciplinary perspectives, the article suggests an analytical frame for polycentric property system responses to climate migration. The case study is Solomon Islands, a South Pacific state with high levels of environmental vulnerability, where people draw on various governance mechanisms to secure proprietary relationships with land. These governance mechanisms not only encompass property rights derived from the state, but also proprietary relationships secured through social norms, informal agreements, and acts of mutual coordination. The key argument is that governance mechanisms to secure property rights for climate migrants have absorptive limits that affect broader processes of adaptation to climate change. The heuristic of absorptive capacity provides a basis to consider adaptive property law for a future of climate migration.

Climate Change, Voluntary Immobility, and Place-Belongingness: Insights from Togoru, Fiji

“…Navigating these issues of land rights, particularly for those without access to suitable customary land, will require complex consultation with the relevant stakeholders including persons, households, and communities being relocated, the provincial and national government, and landowners in the relocation site. However, both formal governance mechanisms and customary arrangements to secure land rights for relocating populations will have limits as increasing numbers of people move in a climate-affected world [101].…”

Introduction to the Handbook on Adaptive Governance

“…More recently, there has been a flurry of work regarding climate change-related issues, predominantly adaptation (Munaretto et al 2014, van Buuren et al 2015, urban resilience Juhola 2015, Westskog et al 2020) and food systems governance (Smith and Lawrence 2018). More recently, the approach has been picked up outside of the environmental and sustainability field, with applications in digital governance (Wang et al 2018) and migration (Fitzpatrick and Monson 2020).…”

Trapped or staying put: Governing immobility in the context of climate change

“…Land tenure systems or arrangements have garnered some attention with respect to climate (im)mobility in the Pacific. The adaptive capacity of predominantly poly-centric land systems in a climate mobility context has both been questioned and its development further encouraged (Fitzpatrick and Monson, 2020). Fitzpatrick (2022, p. 9) notes that whilst risk assessment, especially in areas of urban vulnerability and with it subject to entrapment, is growing, this is not connected to land tenure relationships.…”