Climate Imaginaries and Human Mobility: Complicating Climate Mobility as Adaptation in Thailand

Abstract

For centuries, agricultural households in Thailand have engaged in mobility to adapt to environmental change and climate shocks. However, current framings of “climate migration as adaptation” obscure how these adaptation pathways are constructed by existing power relations, leaving institutions liable to re-enforce inequality. This thesis uses the concept of “imaginaries” to de-construct how certain knowledge and values advance over others in the process of negotiating and acting towards a preferable future. It employs a dual methodological approach with a case study of Baan Non Daeng in Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand to analyze dominant imaginaries in Thailand and their function and limitations in assessing smallholder farmer mobility decision-making in the context of slow on-set environmental change. The thesis first performs a discourse analysis of institutional policy texts on climate change, migration, and development in Thailand to find that institutions value futures that encourage smallholder farmers to leverage their existing resources and act as entrepreneurial agents of development. It also finds that climate mobility imaginaries are founded on the idea of the well-resourced migrant who has access to longer distance mobilities that can transform rural livelihoods. The thesis then uses interviews conducted in Baan Non Daeng to complicate these imaginaries and engage with structural political economy factors driving relative (im)mobilities. It finds that relative positioning influences household perceptions of environmental risks and resources that contribute towards differing practices and scales of mobility. The thesis ends by arguing for processes like knowledge co-production and translocal visioning that better address root issues of marginalization in policy and practice.