CALL FOR PAPERS: Governing Climate Mobilities 15 Years After the Cancun Agreements

Workshop: Governing Climate Mobilities 15 Years After the Cancun Agreements
27-29 May 2025, University for Continuing Education Krems

Almost fifteen years ago, the links between climate change and human mobilities (understood as including
displacement, migration, and planned relocation) were included in an agreed-upon text of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the first time (UNFCCC 2010: 14(f)). Since then,
climate mobilities have been recognised in the 2016 New York Declaration and in the 2018 Global Compact for
Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and the Platform for Disaster Displacement was founded in 2016 to
specifically address cross-border disaster displacement. Furthermore, governance actors from a range of
thematic silos are starting to draw the links between climate change, human mobilities, and their thematic focal
areas. In a parallel development, the emergence of climate mobilities as an established field of governance has
been charted extensively by researchers (Nash 2019, Jakobsson 2021) and scholarship that focuses on how
climate mobilities are being governed has continued to grow.

Over these fifteen years, it has become increasingly clear that the governance of climate mobilities is inherently
vertically and horizontally complex, being highly relevant not only for multiple governance scales, but also across
different thematic governance silos. How people moving in the context of climate change fit within these
complex governance structures, and how these structures should be amended or added to in order to better
account for the dual challenges of climate change and people moving have therefore become lively debates
across a range of disciplines, including but not limited to (international) law, political science, and geography.

We invite contributions that consider how climate mobilities are being integrated into diverent governance
frameworks at all levels of governance and encourage papers that take on a multi-level governance perspective.

We also invite contributions that explore how climate mobilities are being understood and framed by actors
involved in governance processes and what this means for the development of governance frameworks.
We welcome proposals for written papers, which authors are to submit prior to the workshop, and which will be
presented during the workshop in 15-minute oral presentations. Following the workshop, we plan to pursue the
publication of either an edited volume or a special issue. The deadline for proposals is 15th January 2025.
Proposals can be submitted here: https://forms.office.com/e/Xgvr59fjAc. Participants are responsible for
covering their own travel expenses.

This workshop is being conducted as part of the Belmont Forum project ‘Human Mobility, Global Challenges and
Resilience in an Age of Social Stress’ (PHOENIX) and is funded by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF). More
information on the project can be found on the project website: https://www.phoenix-climatemobilities.com

Organisers
Dr. Sarah Haider-Nash, University for Continuing Education Krems:
Alexandra Fortacz, University for Continuing Education Krems:
Dr. Susan Rottmann, Özyeğin University:
Soner Barthoma, Uppsala University:
For administrative questions contact Philipp Hoffmann: