ABSTRACT
The conceptualizations of climate refugees or climate change-induced displacement were in conflict in three major aspects: legal interpretations, security concerns, and political–economic analysis. This chapter explores the three debates, seeking to understand how political–economic actors across the world produced knowledge about climate refugees or climate change-induced displaced people/migrants and what interests of the actors lay behind the different conceptualizations. It explains how the existing literature frames the debates around the concepts of climate refugees and climate change-induced displacement. The existing literature portrays the three debates in such a way that there is a fixed binary division between the Western-industrialized countries and climate-affected countries regarding labelling climate-change-induced uprooted people either as climate refugees or via climate change-induced displacement. The chapter addresses the knowledge gaps in the existing literature regarding the labelling. A group of multi-scalar knowledge brokers have played a key role in reconciling the conflicting interests of refugee-group and migrant-group.
