What is the relation between climate change and international migration? In what ways does climate change and human mobility shape and possibly transform our understanding, and use, of borders? This project examines these questions by studying cross-border human mobility in climate change-affected borderlands; specifically the Pacific, Bengal and West African borderlands. These case-studies give insight into the historical-, socioeconomic-, and political-informed ways in which these relations takes shape.

The TRANSGOV project, through its empirical research, questions the widely held claim that transparency (in the form of reporting and review) is a universal driver of climate action. Rather than a neutral means of implementation, recent findings from the TRANSGOV project show that international reporting rules have largely privileged the climate priorities of developed countries. This impact project will bring these findings to the policy and societal context of Least Developed Countries with their unique set of domestic priorities, in order to challenge the status quo of current transparency systems.

In today’s globalised and multicultural society, attitude, skills and knowledge to collaborate across diverse teams is a must. The recent anti-racism movements have further demonstrated the importance of dealing with diversity. The Bachelor Environmental Sciences (BES) programme at Wageningen University focuses on global environmental issues in international collaborative settings. The switch to become an international programme in 2018, and inflow of a mix of international students, provides new opportunities to develop students’ intercultural competence. This project’s innovation comprises the design and structural embedding of a coherent curricular learning pathway for the development of intercultural competencies, applying dialogue as a key method for collective learning and inquiry. While dialogue as a method has proven to be able to foster co-creative meaning-making across boundaries of practices, it has not been structurally applied in a higher education intercultural curricular learning pathway. Its application throughout the programme allows BES to develop from a programme with international students to a truly international classroom co-creating for global environmental challenges. The project consists of several interrelated activities, also based on dialogue-principles: (1) an inventory of existing developments and projects in skills performance and boundary-crossing; (2) an expert/teacher/student exercise to identify appropriate dialogue-based methods; (3) the improvement/design of dialogical learning activities within identified key courses; (4) implementation and testing the (re)designed activities; (5) alignment and embedding of these activities within a learning pathway; (6) develop insight into students’ competence development within and across various courses, and (7) identifying teachers’ needs to support dialogical learning for intercultural competence development.

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Environmental impacts are a growing factor in human migration. Since 1970, the likelihood of being displaced by an environmental disaster has risen with 60%. Since 2008, each year more than 25 million people were forced to migrate due to environmental impacts such as floods. Climate change is expected to make this worse. Whilst much scholarly research has been done on environmentally-related migration, a blind spot remains when information and communication technologies (ICTs) come into the equation. This whilst ICTs – such as mobile phones and smart phones – and related information exchange are playing a crucial role in decisions and practices of migrants. The central aim of this research is to provide a fundamental understanding of the ways in which ICT-enabled information exchange shapes practices and flows of environmentally-related migration. Through ethnographic methods, the research will inductively build a novel conceptual framework that can demonstrate relations between ICT-usage, information exchange and practices of environmentally-related migration. This will also include an analysis of the content of the information exchanged via ICTs to examine how and to what degree migrants communicate about environmental events. This simultaneously provides a new method to identify the role that the environment plays in these migration processes compared to other socio-economic drivers of migration. The research is conducted via two case-studies: Bangladesh and Kenya. In Bangladesh it is analyzed how ICT-enabled information exchange shapes migration in the context of floods and storms. In Kenya this is analyzed in the context of drought. Fieldwork will focus on migration in and from Barisal and Chittagong divisions in Bangladesh, and on migration in and from Baringo and Samburu counties in Kenya. This includes travelling with migrants to key sites, such as nearby cities and (cross)border villages, to study the role of ICT-enabled information exchange in their migration practices.