RESUMO
Sustainability and migration are typically treated as discrete policy spheres in international, national, and local fora, separated in governance structures and institutions. This results in policy incoherence that hinders just transitions toward more sustainable societies cognizant of mobile realities. This explorative effort identifies the (dis)connections between policy domains using data collected on how the sustainability-migration nexus is governed in four countries with a special emphasis on urban areas: Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. Results of 73 interviews show that migration and sustainability actors find it challenging to see how they could be working together and that migrants are rarely conceived of as sustainability actors and/or targeted populations of sustainability policy. Despite the cross-sectoral nature of sustainability, it appears that migration and sustainability are sequestered into silos that hinder collaborative actions. Lamenting the existence of silos is not enough to encourage new lines of thinking or practice in how sustainability is governed; therefore, we examine the evidence to ascertain current barriers blocking synergetic governance and the opportunities for change perceived by respondents via three critical elements of transformations toward sustainability: structural, systemic, and enabling conditions. We argue that for sustainability transitions to happen, a wider set of societal actors needs to be included from policy intention to action, but that this transformation may require more than policy integration via horizontal coordination. It demands reflexivity and pluralistic pathways that close vertical gaps between national and municipal levels and diminish structural inequalities as they intersect with migration type and status.
RESUMO
Research on the impacts of COVID-19 on mobility has focused primarily on the increased health vulnerabilities of involuntary migrant and displaced populations. But virtually all migration flows have been truncated and altered because of reduced economic and mobility opportunities of migrants. Here we use a well-established framework of migration decision-making, whereby individual decisions combine the aspiration and ability to migrate, to explain how public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic alter migration patterns among urban populations across the world. The principal responses to COVID-19 pandemic that affected migration are: 1) through travel restrictions and border closures, 2) by affecting abilities to move through economic and other means, and 3) by affecting aspirations to move. Using in-depth qualitative data collected in six cities in four continents (Accra, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dhaka, Maputo, and Worcester), we explore how populations with diverse levels of education and occupations were affected in their current and future mobility decisions. We use data from interviews with sample of internal and international migrants and non-migrants during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic outbreak to identify the mechanisms through which the pandemic affected their mobility decisions. The results show common processes across the different geographical contexts: individuals perceived increased risks associated with further migration, which affected their migration aspirations, and had reduced abilities to migrate, all of which affected their migration decision-making processes. The results also reveal stark differences in perceived and experienced migration decision-making across precarious migrant groups compared to high-skilled and formally employed international migrants in all settings. This precarity of place is particularly evident in low-income marginalised populations.
