Negotiating human mobilities in the context of climate change: a spotlight on the UNFCCC

15.03.2017: Vortrag von Dr. Sarah Louise NASH

Mittwoch, 15.03.2017, 15 h
Institut für Geographie und Regionalforschung
Universität Wien, Universitätsstr. 7/5, 1010 Wien, Hörsaal 5A


Since 2008 policymaking on human mobility has been taking place under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This has led to mentions of human mobility in high-level documents of the UNFCCC, work on human mobility being carried out by the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage and, in 2015 in Paris, the creation of a task force on displacement. These developments have also made the UNFCCC the main forum for global policymaking on human mobility in the context of climate change. However, policymaking is not a neutral process consisting of an objective choice between different competing policy alternatives. It is therefore important to look more closely at the processes by which human mobilities are being negotiated within the UNFCCC.

This lecture will chart the emergence of human mobility as an area of policymaking for the UNFCCC. In doing so, it will address different aspects of the negotiating process: how human mobility is being conceptualised and understood; different policy alternatives that have been proposed; the controversies, details and technicalities that have fuelled debates; the broad strokes of policy that have been included in high-level agreements; and the work that is ongoing to fill in these broad strokes, giving form to otherwise vague high-level agreements. Finally, this lecture will look to the future, highlighting future meetings of the UNFCCC that will be important for human mobility and also tying policymaking taking place in the UNFCCC into other global policy processes.


 

Dr. Sarah Louise Nash is a 2016/17 Mercator-IPC Fellow at Istanbul Policy Center, Sabanci University and an associated postdoctoral researcher in the research group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) at the University of Hamburg. She received her PhD in political science in January 2017 from the University of Hamburg with a thesis titled ‘From Cancun to Paris: an era of policymaking on the migration and climate change nexus’. She also holds an MSc in Human Rights and International Politics (University of Glasgow), an MA in German and Politics (University of Edinburgh) and a BA in Political Science (University of Vienna). She is currently conducting research on the politics of climate change and human mobility in the context of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage (WIM) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Her research interests include climate change politics and policy, human mobilities, human rights, discourse analysis, and critical border studies.