Safe from what? Understanding environmental non-migration in Chilean Patagonia through ontological security and risk perceptions

Abstract

Why do communities prefer to stay in place despite potentially dangerous changes in their environment, even when governmental support for outmigration or resettlement is provided? That is the key question this paper seeks to answer. Voluntary immobility is a burgeoning research topic in environmental change-related migration studies, although the role of local sense-making of perceived risks and migration pressures has received only little attention. In order to examine decisions for non-migration, we argue that we need to consider people’s ontological security, or subjective sense of existential safety, which shapes risk perceptions. We apply this to the case of Villa Santa Lucía in Chilean Patagonia, where the local population has rejected relocation policies after the village was severely damaged by a mudslide in December 2017. We show how this rejection is not based on the lack of abilities to move, but on a fundamentally different risk assessment grounded in locally specific social representations of nature and human-nature relations. This alternative understanding of environmental risks allows the local population to uphold their sense of ontological security while remaining in Villa Santa Lucía, and renders relocation to avoid exposure to natural hazards futile or even inconsistent with local identities. We conclude that local sense-making of environmental risks is an important component of a more fine-grained understanding of environmental non-migration decisions.

Climate change and non-migration — exploring the role of place relations in rural and coastal Bangladesh

“…The so-called stayers (non-migrants) require much greater research scrutiny (Hjälm, 2013). There is an emergent research agenda exploring the experiences of those that are labelled as either voluntarily immobile (Wiegel et al, 2021) or involuntarily immobile in response to climate-induced risks (Zickgraf, 2019;Ayeb-Karlsson et al, 2018;Mallick & Schanze, 2020). The latter are often described as a 'trapped' population (Black & Collyer, 2014).…”

“…The seemingly binary categories of voluntary and involuntary non-migration belie the complexity of socio-environmental and economic conditions, cultural ties, household livelihood strategies, and other internal and external factors that lead to non-migratory responses. Non-migration is a complex area of social research, embedded within a matrix of socio-cultural values, expectations, and place relations that inform individual, household, and community-scale migratory decisions (Wiegel et al, 2021). This matrix links migratory and nonmigratory decision-making with a host of related socio-cultural and physical environmental factors including cultural conditions, economic structures, and livelihood opportunities (Adams, 2016;Logan et al, 2016;Ayeb-Karlsson et al, 2018;Zickgraf, 2019;Mallick & Schanze, 2020); community histories and oral traditions (Nunn & Campbell, 2020); religious and spiritual beliefs and practices, economic opportunities, family ties, and social responsibilities (Cohen & Sirkeci, 2011); and adaptive capacity and perceptions of environmental threat.…”

“…In this paper, we aim to problematise and explore the experiences of non-migrants living under conditions of both acute and long-term climate-induced environmental stress through qualitative exploration of at-risk communities in Bangladesh. We examine the features and processes of local sense-making that occur towards climate-induced threats and migratory opportunities (Nawrotzki & DeWaard, 2018), including locally specific social representations of nature and human-nature relations (Wiegel et al, 2021), attachments to family and work (Kelman et al, 2019), and how these translate into migratory and non-migratory conditions for at-risk communities (Farbotko et al, 2016). Through qualitative analysis, we explore the dialectic of voluntary and involuntary non-migration phenomena through the lens of place relations -contributing to the emerging literatures on the social and economic geography of climate change adaption responses within vulnerable communities.…”

A review of drivers of environmental non-migration decisions in Africa

“…As a concept, migration encompasses a wide variety of movements and engages people with multiple experiences and backgrounds. Migration can be voluntary -when people decide to migrate, or forced by existing circumstances, such as extreme weather events (Mallick and Schanze 2020;Wiegel et al 2021). The decision to migrate (or not) is influenced by social (e.g., placebased attachment: the bond between people and places), political (e.g., democratic institutions), economic (current or discounted income), demographic (e.g., age structure), and environmental factors (e.g., hazard frequency) (Foresight 2011a; Adams 2016; IOM 2020; Biswas and Mallick 2021;Khalil and Jacobs 2021).…”

“…In addition to the rich migration-environment literature (Hunter 2005;Abu et al 2014;Cattaneo and Peri 2016), there has been increasing recognition that some populations exposed to environmentally hazardous conditions do not move (Bhusal et al 2021;Wiegel et al 2021). Emerging scholarship on non-migration reveals that staying can be voluntary, as opposed to only involuntary as a result of the incapacity to move (Mallick and Shanze 2020;Bhusal et al 2021).…”