From Cancun to Paris: An Era of Policy Making on Climate Change and Migration

Policy making on climate change and migration has become a routine agenda point of global climate change politics. In particular, the period between the Cancun climate negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2010 and the Paris negotiations in 2015 was very important for the emergence of the nexus of climate change and migration as a policy priority. This article conducts a genealogy of policy making on climate change and migration and finds that the period between Cancun and Paris constitutes a distinct era of policy making. This analysis is structured around four areas where shifts have taken place that contribute to delineating this era from others, either through shifts in relation to the eras preceding or succeeding it, or in terms of substantial shifts and dislocations that have taken place during this era. These areas are: (1) the institutional settings for policy making; (2) the actors involved in policy making; (3) the language employed; (4) the mobilisation of knowledge. This analysis is an important undertaking for denaturalising policy making on climate change and migration and promoting understandings of it as contingent, as well as historically, socially, politically, and institutionally situated.