Migration and the environment

This chapter argues that the dominance of discourses around climate change-induced migration in Southeast Asia overlooks the multifarious linkages between migration and the environment in a region which has long been characterised by mobility, local and transnational migration, and where livelihoods are frequently conducted on a multi-local basisis. Indeed, Southeast Asia’s development is built on the conjuncture of capital, nature and mobile labour, indicating that environments themselves have been produced through migration of various forms. Drawing on a series of conceptual lenses that emphasize socially-produced natures and socio-natural assemblages, the chapter explores the multiple links between migration and the environment in Southeast Asia, in part to complicate and contextualise otherwise simplistic framings of environmental crisis and migration in the region. This argument is made through reference to empirical studies that (i) demonstrate nature’s agency in shaping migration patterns in the region, (ii) show how socially-produced environments are forged through assemblages of displacement and migration, (iii) identify the ways migration and migrant livelihood practices have produced the region’s environments, and (iv) that reveal the mobile spatialities of injustice around hazardous ‘socionatures’ in different Southeast Asian settings.