The Emergence of Environmental Migration and Displacement Management 'Best Practices' in the Pacific

Abstract

Despite the growing challenge of environmental migration and displacement, the international community has yet to establish a global governance framework. But solutions are emerging in the Pacific. This thesis adopts the follow policy methodology to trace the emergence of 'best practices' in the issue area. By interviewing and observing policy elites operating across nine policy domains and three policy scales, it identified three regulatory approaches to environmental mobility: humanitarian protection, labour migration, and planned relocation. This research project seeks to explain variations in the extent to which these 'models' have become institutionally embedded in the Pacific.

This thesis argues that regional policy variations can be explained by activating events, institutional landscape, mobilising strategies, and local conditions. It makes four key contributions to geographical scholarship on policy mobilities and environmental migration and displacement governance. First, the notion of policy assemblage lifecycle demonstrates that pre-existing development-friendly approaches spread quickly and successfully across the region while new humanitarian solutions have moved slowly. This suggests that policy adoption decisions have little to do with policy 'effectiveness.' Second, the concept of activating events shows that different types of events galvanised actors in different ways to shape multilevel environmental mobility policies. Third, the regional dimension explicates that while external actors initiated the policymaking processes, Pacific organisations and governments created conducive conditions for embracing certain approaches. Finally, interagency cooperation on the issue area across multiple sites and scales is beginning to establish environmental mobility governance.