The Devil's in the Detail: Policymaking on Climate Change and Human Mobility in the UNFCCC

Executive Summary

People move in a variety of ways and for a myriad of reasons. In recent years, there has been a growing acceptance that one of these reasons is, and increasingly will be, climate change. One of the results of this growing acceptance has been the attempt to create policy on climate change and human mobility, in particular under the auspices of global climate change negotiations.

However, policymaking is never a neutral process: many different voices actively try to influence policymaking, with complex power dynamics ensuring that some voices are heard more than others. Therefore, if we want to understand climate change and human mobility, it is imperative to not only understand the links between these two phenomena, a theme that has been prevalent in academic research, but also how policymaking processes treat the linked phenomena and how rules are created around them.