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Selected Works of Costanza Rampini
Article
Migration Amidst Climate Rigidity Traps: Resource Politics and Social–Ecological Possibilism in Honduras and Peru
Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2014)
  • David J. Wrathall, United Nations University
  • Jeffrey Bury, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Mark Carey, University of Oregon
  • Bryan Mark, The Ohio State University
  • Jeff McKenzie, McGill University
  • Kenneth Young, University of Texas at Austin
  • Michel Baraer, Université du Québec
  • Adam French, University of California - Berkeley
  • Costanza Rampini, University of California, Santa Cruz
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Abstract
According to dominant narratives about adaptation to climate change, those facing worst-case scenarios, without means at their disposal to adapt in situ, face an ineluctable set of adaptation strategies that ultimately includes the permanent abandonment of geographic spaces rendered uninhabitable and unproductive for human use. Yet environmental stress and adaptive capacity are distributed unevenly, and power structures play a role in fashioning them. It is argued here that when access to land and water are impacted by environmental stress, the structures that mediate their access are reinforced, even as the adaptive alternatives for smallholders are undermined. In this way, dominant resource regimes set up migration as the primary viable alternative for adaptation among a dwindling set of choices. This framework is applied to two early analogues of climate change impacts: flooded Garífuna villages of Honduras's North Coast and communities enduring glacier recession and shifting hydrologic regimes in Peru's Cordillera Blanca. In both cases, stress motivates new forms of migration that reinforce dominant power structures. In Honduras, migrants from wealthier social strata are moving on a more permanent basis, and in Peru, the once historical pattern of labor migration is becoming a practical necessity. These cases underscore the role of political economy in adaptation to climate change and adaptive migration in particular.
Keywords
  • adaptation,
  • climate change,
  • migration,
  • political ecology,
  • social–ecological systems
Disciplines
Publication Date
2014
DOI
10.1080/00045608.2013.873326
Publisher Statement
SJSU users: use the following link to login and access the article via SJSU databases.
Citation Information
David J. Wrathall, Jeffrey Bury, Mark Carey, Bryan Mark, et al.. "Migration Amidst Climate Rigidity Traps: Resource Politics and Social–Ecological Possibilism in Honduras and Peru" Annals of the American Association of Geographers Vol. 104 Iss. 2 (2014) p. 292 - 304 ISSN: 2469-4452
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/costanza-rampini/8/