ABSTRACT
Gender is an organizing principle in migration, yet relatively few theoretical and empirical studies on migration and environmental change integrate a gender perspective. This chapter provides an overview of existing literature analysing the migration and environmental change nexus from a gender lens, whilst highlighting progress in related areas of study such as gender and migration, gender and environmental hazards/climate change, and gender and development. Following an approach proposed by Hunter and David (2009), the authors present two pathways through which impacts of environmental change on human mobility can be analysed from a gender perspective: increases in severity and/or frequency of extreme weather events and shifts in proximate natural resources and agricultural potential. The chapter then delves into the ‘developmentalisation’ of the scholarly debate on migration and climate change adaptation; that is, the replication within this strand of literature of themes that characterize the broader ‘migration and development’ scholarship, and its gendered implications. In the last part, the authors present concrete steps for future research to integrate a gender perspective into theoretical and empirical work on migration and environmental change. The chapter concludes that the next generation of research must integrate a strong relational gender perspective, and harvest the benefit of more contamination across discipline and inter-disciplinary research.
