The United Nations is 75 years old on 24 October 2020. It’s an unfortunate year to be reaching this milestone. Apart from global pandemic turmoil, there are many critical challenges including mass extinctions of languages and species, rising inequality, and climate disruptions.

Arguably now more than ever, addressing these challenges is central to the UN’s work through initiatives like the Sustainable Development Goals. However, it is difficult to deny that the UN has also often played a role in worsening the same challenges, particularly by promoting development as modernization around the world.

Under modernization, people’s diverse ways of living and knowing may be classified as ‘traditional’. They are inferiorized using representations that impute to them traits such as ‘backwardness’, ‘underdevelopment’, ‘savagery’, ‘irrationality’, ‘inefficiency’, and the ‘lack of capabilities’ to innovate. Through such negative labelling ‘inferiorized’ ways of living and knowing are disqualified from what counts as progress, leaving it to be colonized by modernity.

This coloniality promotes the modern world as superior to all alternatives. Modernity is seen as being made through the singular rationality associated with its own science, technology, industrialization, transportation and communication infrastructures, standardization, individualization, and bureaucratic governance.

This hasn’t always happened without a fight. ’Inferiorized non-modern’ peoples have often refused and resisted modernity, particularly under modern European colonialism. At the same time, many colonized people also made creative use of modernizing ideas such as property rights and nationalism. In general, different regions have tried to adapt and embed modernization into their own contexts, including as part of neoliberal globalization.

Modernity that has been realized as a result takes many different forms. Alternative modernities span capitalist, socialist and communist political-economic systems. Yet they all have one thing in common: overblown imaginations of control – by culture of nature, by governments of nations, by bureaucracy of organizations, by science of reason, by industry of production, by capital of (racialized) labour, by patriarchy of genders, and by metropole of colonies.

Unfortunately, imaginations of control have been integral to the UN’s promotion of modernization as development. Yet within such overarching imaginations, the UN’s democratic ethos of listening and learning have produced some very positive results.

So, on this 75^th UN day, we commend its many achievements. Against a backdrop of severe adversity, celebrating hard-won successes can be crucial in nurturing hope. As James Baldwin observed: “the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live.”

If the world in which we live offers nothing to celebrate, then hopeful visions for the future can be rather difficult to imagine. In this extended blogpost, we try to celebrate the UN, but with our own wishful excursions, to nurture hopes for pluralist sustainable futures.

We are not historians of the UN. Much has been written about its achievements. So we will keep our celebrations brief, focusing on the field of sustainable development in which the UN has been a beacon of hope since the 1970s.

Recognizing “man-made harm” at the Stockholm Conference

In 1972, the year of the founding of the United Nations Environment Programme, the UN recognized widespread “evidence of man-made harm” at the Stockholm Conference. This included the “destruction and depletion of irreplaceable resources” and “dangerous levels of pollution in water, air, earth and living beings.”

In this recognition of “man-made harm”, a mythical singular idea of “man” was held to be responsible. Human victims and survivors were made indistinguishable from – apparently as much to blame as – the forces of modernizing development themselves. These forces have included large-scale mining; industrialization of agriculture using toxic chemicals and water-guzzling crops; high-tech weapons for modern warfare within and between nation-states; and millions of climate-disrupting motorized vehicles that burn fossil fuels.

Assigning responsibility to a general and apparently homogenous “man” lets the key culprits off the hook: the particular political-economic forces and interests that promote modernizing development, at the expense of plural alternatives rooted in the diverse ecological and technical knowledge traditions of the world.

In addition, the 1972 Conference declaration held “under-development” to be the cause of “most of the environmental problems” in poorer countries. Only in industrialized countries was it acknowledged that “environmental problems are generally related to industrialization and technological development.”

Yet the same industrialized countries were called upon to help the developing ones to “close the gap”. This kind of linear thinking about closing the gap – or ‘catching up’ – has marred developmentalism since the 19^th Century, when many European colonizers initiated their missions to ‘civilize’ the colonized. The latter were ‘inferiorized’ but considered able to climb the ladder of civilization by becoming more modern.

Critically then, despite recognizing “man-made” problems associated with modernity, the UN promoted modernization as a singular direction along which to realize development. Only the modern world was imagined as enabling desirable futures for societies. This thrust was carried into later landmark interventions by the UN for promoting sustainable development.

Saving modernity through our common future?

Consider the pathbreaking 1987 report Our Common Future (OCF), which gave sustainable development its famous intergenerational definition, with which (to its credit) most readers will be familiar: “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” OCF made crucial contributions by linking human well-being to “non-economic variables” such as “clean air and water, and the protection of natural beauty.”

Like the Stockholm Conference, OCF highlighted the unsustainability of modernizing industrialization along the lines of so-called developed countries. Yet, once again, the UN proposed to continue with modernization, based on new developments in technology and science, including transport and communication infrastructures. These positive developments were assumed to have bestowed on modern humans the “power to reconcile human affairs with natural laws”.

For example, this power was observed to allow more efficient use of resources for modern energy generation (and energy efficiency of appliances) and of technological inputs in food production. The dominant understanding of sustainable development in OCF was that of more efficient modernization: “to produce more with less.”

Overall, OCF appears to be geared towards saving the modern world, by improving the efficiency of modernizing developments for “a new era of economic growth”. But what is ‘efficiency’? It is simply a proportion between apparently given variables. If “non-economic variables” are indeed crucial for human well-being, then why not look beyond the modern world for imaginations of well-being that are not tied to the quest for economic growth?

While directions of development based on diverse traditions of well-being were marginalised in OCF, the existence of alternatives to modernization was clearly acknowledged. Many of these alternatives were also observed to be under threat by continued modernization.

For instance, vulnerable communities of “indigenous or tribal peoples” were noted as “repositories of vast accumulations of traditional knowledge and experience that links humanity with its ancient origins.” Yet these vast accumulations were excluded from shaping directions of development that would offer alternatives to modernization.

People considered ‘indigenous’ were consulted through public hearings in the process of preparing the OCF. In these hearings, representatives of ‘indigenous’ people opposed their displacement from ancestral lands in the name of development. They observed their peoples’ lack of participation in constituting plural directions of development. For example, the president of the Native Council of Canada argued that the people he represented “are the first to detect when the forests are being threatened, … the first to feel the pollution of our waters … [but] are the last to be consulted about how, when, and where developments should take place”.

Governing hope with the Sustainable Development Goals?

Rolling forward three decades, it is a very positive feature of the 2015-30 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that this time around, representatives of ‘indigenous’ and marginalized communities – and of many other groups across different countries – were consulted. Indeed, the SDGs are arguably the most comprehensive achievements of the UN in this field.

With 17 goals and 169 targets, the range of issues addressed by the SDGs is truly impressive. In the preamble to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN and its member countries appear “determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world on to a sustainable and resilient path.”

The UN does not state that the world invoked in this new initiative is modernity. However, it overlooks the fact that other worlds – for example, of nomadic pastoralists or forest-dwelling Amazonians – are not the ones urgently needing a shift to ‘a sustainable and resilient path’. None of these multiple possible other worlds are seen as helping, in their own right, to constitute new directions of sustainable development.

For instance, shamanic traditions are repudiated for their esoteric ways of knowing and systems of knowledge. But pragmatic capitalism nonetheless often quietly recognises the fruits of these knowledges when it seeks to patent and profit from insights about the health benefits of many natural materials. Only when clothed in the trappings of modernity – for instance as pharmaceuticals – are these ‘nonmodern’ knowledges anonymously upheld.

Despite the best of intentions, then, the UN’s SDGs seem implicitly attached to protecting existing modernity in the name of saving the world. Just like OCF, the existence of alternatives to industrial modernization is recognized in the SDGs. But under chosen metrics, they appear ‘inferior’ as compared to a new and ostensibly sustainable modernity.

Thus, modernization is still the direction for development that is promoted. This is evident in the definition of many goals and targets, but perhaps most explicitly in Goal 7 directed at universal access to “modern energy services”. Other goals and targets promote modern information and communication technologies as enabling ‘gender equality’, ‘quality education’, ‘resilient infrastructures’, ‘sustainable industrialization’, and the overall acceleration of ‘human progress’.

Even for the goal of ending hunger, modern infrastructure, research, extension, and gene banks are promoted to “enhance agricultural productive capacity”. Within the same goal, target 2.3 calls for doubling agricultural productivity of (women and ‘indigenous’) smallholders by 2030, thereby problematizing small-scale agriculture as insufficiently productive.

Similarly, the UN’s framework of indicators for the SDGs, which includes metrics such as number of children attending formal schools or literacy rates, often score ‘indigenous’ people as lagging behind a population’s average. This again problematizes ‘indigenous’ people as deficient.

Providing the framework for this discourse of deficiencies, the UN inadvertently plays a part in the assimilation of ‘indigenous’ peoples into modernity. A modernity that is now aiming for sustainability by 2030, through the SDGs. A new form of sustainable modernization is thus pushed to the forefront for saving the world.

Central to this singular world saving itself are cutting-edge technological developments and scientific research. Yet possible adverse effects of these techno-scientific innovations are downplayed. Uncertainties are suppressed. And alternatives based on knowledges and materials of diverse practitioners such as agroecological smallholders, forest-dwellers, shamans, and nomadic pastoralists are marginalised.

Embracing many worlds

Despite centuries of disqualification and destruction of (formerly) colonized peoples’ lifeways, the earth is still home to many other worlds that have resisted assimilation into modernity. These represent the earth’s pluriverse, which may be defined as ‘a world in which many worlds fit’, using the Zapatistas’ words.

Each of these worlds is constituted by its own ways of relating between different beings, human and nonhuman. Each world produces its own languages and techniques that mediate relations between humans and with nonhumans. Through these relations, diverse knowledges are produced and practices are performed to connect and communicate across categorical divides between nature and culture. Each world is thus composed by specific ways of knowing and living.

As noted above, the globalized modern world is underpinned by control and domination of humans and nonhumans it mythologizes as inferior. In contrast, other plural worlds may be underpinned by hospitality and kinship towards those considered different. They may also approach animals and plants as beings with agency very similar to humans.

For example, consider Viveiros de Castro’s account of other worlds in Amazonia that approach animals and humans as sharing the same culture, the same soul. Animals are persons who have their own ‘spirit’ masters with capacities analogous to human shamans. There is nothing culturally distinctive about humans as a species.

Due to their shared culture, humans and animals approach their surroundings in the same way. But the things that are seen differ between humans and animals. For example, “what to us is blood, is maize beer to the jaguar; … what we see as a muddy waterhole, the tapirs see as a great ceremonial house.”

Worlds in the making

Diverse ways of living and knowing, such as in Amazonia, are constituted by the worlds they are embedded in. In turn, ways of knowing and living make their worlds of a pluriverse. The plural worlds are thus continually in the making.

This making of worlds is also contingent on the situations and contexts in which we as observers of worlds are embedded. Depending on how we approach reality, what perspectives we adopt and what tools we use, a different pluriverse will be traversed by us. And no matter how comprehensive are our techniques to map the Earth’s pluriverse, our efforts will always be incomplete and imbalanced.

Thus, whilst no complete charting of the pluriverse is ever possible in any single definitive sense, each of us can definitely embrace a pluriverse beyond modernity. This is not about excluding or eradicating every constituent strand of modernity itself. That would – ironically – perpetuate the same reflex of dominating control. In a pluriverse, these strands can admit uncertainty and cultivate humility – like others – to weave and entangle in a rhizomic multiplicity of ways.

So, a country – even the earth as a whole – can appear to be a single technologically interconnected world, encompassed by modernity. But both beyond and within it, there are always other worlds to be embraced, real and possible, historical and contemporary.

To sustain these worlds of an embraced pluriverse beyond modernity, multiple ways of knowing and living need to be supported. This support is not something to be engineered or furnished by ‘modern saviours’ – or for that matter, individualised heroic saviours of any kind. Hero stories can now be left behind.

Embracing a pluriverse is a rather more humble practice, situated in distributed and convivial struggles that strive for three interrelated collective purposes:

1. To nurture the diversity of ways of knowing and living that make many worlds thrive in different places – by unshackling modernity from a coloniality that ‘inferiorizes’, controls and destroys other worlds, using overbearing singular ideas of ‘rationality’ or ‘efficiency’ and using racial, casteist, gendered, ethnic, religious or other hierarchically ordering categories;
2. To respect each of these ways of knowing and living as requiring its own webs of relations between human and nonhuman beings, which stand on their own terms (rather than as lesser versions of something else) – for instance being conditioned more by care and hospitality than by control and domination;
3. To acknowledge all these ways of knowing and living as contributing their own possible directions for progress towards sustainability – rather than promoting sustainable development as ‘improvement’ or assimilation through modernization.

Where a pluriverse is embraced, hope is no longer colonized by modernity. Thus can modernity itself be liberated from its own self-destructive dissonance and denial of the domination it inflicts – and the ever more futile ambitions to control that it pursues.

The challenge then, is not to ‘save the world’ in any supposedly singular categorical way. A more flourishing way for life is to embrace a pluriverse, to celebrate and nurture and interconnect the multiplicity of worlds.

Despite the many flaws and compromises – and the oppressive weight of the global hegemony in which it struggles – it is a remarkable achievement of the UN, that it can help create space for this growing pluriverse, to which a truly transformative agenda for sustainability can lead.

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Photo: TNS Sofres | cc-by 2.0

Viola Prifti, Postdoctoral Researcher at HTW Berlin (IPACST project) explores the transformative potential of smart farming practices and how open data can help overcome ownership barriers.

Transformation is at the heart of agriculture. Hunting, domestication of wild crops, the Green Revolution and most recently agriculture 4.0, are all phases of agricultural evolution.

Yet our food system remains fragile, and it is clear that achieving food security for all in line with the Agenda 2030 goals demands further transformation towards sustainable agriculture.

Smart farming, which uses data-driven methods to better manage agricultural production, can help meet this aim. Using big data paired with emerging artificial intelligence technologies such as remote sensing, automatic control and yield monitoring, smart farming technologies collect, analyse and use data to allow farmers to be more efficient, profitable and environmentally friendly.

This data-driven approach can also be used to monitor and track perishable goods, and has proved its worth in dealing with transit delays caused by COVID-19 counter-measures. Smart farming tools hold potential for farmers in the Global North and South alike, as shown by the iCow social media platform from Kenya, which connects farmers with stakeholders via SMS.

Data ownership

Smart farming is characterised by a complex data system: farmers generate a wealth of raw data through their resources and personal labour; agronomy companies extract additional value from processing this data; smart farming consultants, government agencies, retail agronomists and seed companies also act as data collectors.

Given the lack of specific legislation on who owns smart farming data, ownership is defined through contracts. But farmers often lack the negotiating power and skills to advance their own interests.

While raw data cannot be owned, once it has been processed or arranged as a database, it may be given copyright protection and thereby become a controlled asset. Intellectual property rights may also apply to data and related devices, and define ownership to a certain extent.

These and other types of intellectual property rights, such as patents and trade secrets, grant exclusive rights to the owners of data-related devices. So as they no longer own the data they have produced, farmers may miss out on opportunities to capitalise on the data they have generated, which is ultimately sold back to them.

As a result, farmers have little incentive to adopt smart farming practices. To ensure it is a sustainable solution that benefits farmers alongside those gathering and analysing their data, innovations in smart farming need to be more responsible and inclusive.

Towards open data

The EU’s proposal to modernise its Common Agricultural Policy – a system of agricultural subsidies and other programmes – calls for “open, collaborative systems”. Indeed, the complex digital ecosystem required for smart farming thrives on data exchange, openness and inclusivity rather than closed proprietary systems.

A shift from data ownership to open data is already evident in EU agricultural policy through a variety of projects that support collaborative networks to access data, such as the Fispace project, which enables internet-based solutions to collaborative agri-food business networks. A similar initiative in the private sector is the Yara International and IBM partnership to create the “Open Farm & Field Data Exchange” data-sharing platform.

Yet although open collaborative platforms hold great potential for sustainable business and profitability, alone they are not enough to promote the adoption of smart farming at scale or to guarantee the protection of public interests, such as food safety or biodiversity.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has exposed the need to build resilient and sustainable agricultural systems, but the law is still lagging behind. While developing and adapting specific laws may require more time, there is an urgent need for guidance on open smart farming data to guarantee agri-innovation and sustainability.

Private initiatives such as OpenAG Data Alliance and AGGateaway are already developing common data protocols, but the focus seems to be on crops developed by the stakeholders involved, not necessarily on the 64 most important crops for human consumption.

The role of governments in enabling partnerships and incentivising smart farming for the public good is of utmost importance now. Guided by values such as common good, inclusivity and transparency, they can set the path for a more sustainable future.

The author acknowledges that four paragraphs of this post are based on a working paper on smart farming and data ownership written in collaboration with Dr. Argyro Karanasiou.

This blog was first posted on the Farming First blog. Farming First is a partner of the International Science Council. 

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Header photo: marada via Flickr.

How many researchers in their entrepreneurship journey are familiar with the situation in the image below? Or does it reflect anyone’s fears when trying to commercialize follow-up inventions originated in a lab? How many other IP-related concerns do researchers have?

One common wish and interest of researchers all around the world is to be able to research freely and publish freely. Any legal restriction is perceived as unnecessary and cumbersome. Law, however, is a means to provide certainty to any social relation. The relevance of law, and of IP in particular, becomes obvious and essential to researchers when they need to protect the creations of their mind, either for academic purposes (filing a patent, avoiding infringement or distinguishing one’s own invention from that of a colleague) or for business aims (how many start-ups come from universities?).

Viola Prifti, IPACST team member in Berlin, contributed to raising awarenness on IP issues for research & entrepreneurship in 2 events. As an alumna of Young Entrepreneurs in Science, she organized a webinar on the platform of the Falling Walls Foundation in July. In August, she discussed similar issues with members of the Researchers-Entrepreneurs at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Viola thanks Dr. Olga Makarova and Prof. Dr. Hannes Rothe at Freie Universität Berlin and Sarah Scheck of Falling Walls Foundation for their collaboration and support!

Gaining awarennes about IP helps contribute to a more sustainable future! Can you imagine a world with no legal certainty on business assets and own creative assets? It would be a very messy world; IP tries to prevent that. A fair application and respect of the rules helps create a better future for all!

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Header image by Evan Dennis on Unsplash

By Amina Maharjan, Ricardo Safra de Campos and Chandni Singh.

What happens when spatial diversification of livelihoods is not an option anymore?

Labour migration – an important livelihood strategy

Migration has long existed in South Asia. It has historically been central to the lives and livelihoods of individuals and households across the subcontinent. People have always moved – for employment and marriage, to avoid conflict and disasters, to meet personal aspirations, and to access opportunities. These movements, while individual and local, are also significant at regional and national scales. In India, internal migrants account for 37% of the country’s population, while in Nepal and Bangladesh, they account for 14% and 10% respectively as per Census 2011. The Labour Force Survey of Pakistan (2014–2015) estimates that around 13% of the country’s population are internal migrants. Significantly, internal migration is a key livelihood strategy across South Asia. It is estimated that remittances from internal migrants amounted to USD 10 billion in India (2007–08). In Bangladesh, data from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) of 2010 estimated that about 12% of households received internal remittances.

Climate change and migration

While present-day migration across South Asia draws on multi-generational experiences, existing social networks, and past encounters in regular migration destinations, these patterns of movement are increasingly being mediated by ongoing climate change. In “climate hotspots” – locations where climate change impacts are well pronounced and well documented, such as the Himalayan region of South Asia, the deltaic regions in east India and Bangladesh, and semi-arid lands across Pakistan and southern India – people are increasingly adopting migration as a strategy to adapt to the environmental impacts associated with climate change and to deal with increasing risks.

Modelling exercises project that without any action, internal migrants in South Asia, currently estimated at over 40 million (or 1.8% of the region’s population), can increase to 25% or six-fold between 2020 and 2050. Such narratives of climate-induced migration are often criticized by different factions – for being alarmist on the one hand, and underplaying one of the largest challenges of a globalized world on the other. What, then, is the picture on the ground?

To assess what is driving migration and how it affects household incomes, wellbeing, and capacities to deal with climate change, we conducted a multi-country study across 21 locations in Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Using empirical evidence across 9,440 migrant and non-migrant households, we examined the drivers and experiences of migration, exploring who migrate, where they migrate to, and towards what end.

We found that in climate-sensitive hotspots across South Asia, migration is an important way for people to diversify livelihoods and respond to multiple climatic and non-climatic risks. In the Sunderbans delta across east India and Bangladesh, for example, existing threats from extreme events such as cyclones intersect with non-climatic factors such as limited livelihood diversification opportunities to drive migration. In semi-arid areas in South India, increasingly erratic rainfall and prolonged drought, as well as shifting youth aspirations (away from farming) are driving young men to migrate to cities such as Bangalore and Mumbai. In the Himalaya, already precarious livelihoods are being exacerbated by extreme and erratic rainfall, forcing people to seek secure income sources outside the marginal mountains. In Pakistan’s semi-arid areas, floods, droughts, and heat waves are significant climatic risks that force people to migrate in order to build their ability to manage risks better back home. Empirical evidence suggests that most of this migration is internal.

Migration is also gendered. In our study locations, more men (83%) than women (17%) have migrated. The outcomes of migratory movement are mediated by gender. Women who moved as well as those who were left behind reported higher work burdens and reduced time for leisure. However, in some cases, such as in peri-urban Bangalore, migrant women reported improved well-being, with higher incomes translating to greater autonomy and bargaining power within households.

Does migration help households manage risks better?

In climate change research, migration is often portrayed as an adaptation strategy – denoting that those with resources and networks can move out of risk-prone regions altogether or at least spatially diversify their livelihoods – and as such is taken as a successful mechanism with which to deal with climate change. However, the climate refugee discourse views migration as the last resort of the most vulnerable, tending to identify migrants as most exposed to climate change and with reduced capacity to adapt to risk. In our work across South Asia, we found that such binary views of migration do not fully realize the breadth of migrant experiences in the real world.

Our study found that remittances greatly improve households’ capacity to diversify income and move away from sectors exposed to climate change – such as farming and fishing. Remittances also insured families against a range of other environmental stressors, including droughts, floods, and landslides. However, when the most able bodied member of a family moves, those left behind find themselves in more vulnerable positions during times of hazard. Additionally, due to existing gender inequalities, an absence of male members in a household can adversely affect its capacity to adapt to climate change impacts. The outcomes of migration are therefore highly heterogeneous, and strongly influenced by who moves, what capacities they possess, and where they move to.

Falling between the cracks – migrants and the Covid-19 pandemic response

The COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly devastating for migrants across South Asia, with numerous reports of migrants losing jobs in destination cities that are under lockdown, being quarantined at borders and unable to return to their homes, and facing extreme food shortages as they fall through social safety nets. In India, migrants hit by a sudden and complete lockdown and unsure of where to look for food and shelter have died trying to cover hundreds of kilometres on foot. In a belated move, the government has taken steps to include migrant workers under social protection schemes. In Bangladesh, the task of supporting vulnerable migrants working in the country’s informal sector has fallen upon voluntary organizations with limited capacity to do so. Its financial stimulus package – announced by the Prime Minister to support export-oriented industries to fight the adverse impact of COVID-19 on the economy – does cover workers employed in the formal sector though, where internal migrants – mostly employed in garment factories – form the bulk of the workforce. In Nepal, the government’s advance announcement of planned closures of long-distance transport as a measure to mitigate the spread of the virus led to an exodus of internal migrant workers heading home. Those stranded in destinations were provided with food support by local authorities. Similarly in Pakistan relief was provided to daily wage workers, many of whom are migrant workers. In all cases, lack of data has been a major challenge in providing the needed support to the migrant workers. Thousands of migrant workers heading home to Nepal from India were stuck at border points for a long time before they could reach their home.

The Global Compact for Migration covers the needs and safety concerns of international migrants. However, internal migration, which is less visible, has not received as much policy attention at national and sub-national scales. This relative inattention has resulted in inadequate and conflicting data on the nature and number of internal migrants as well as the policies that include them.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed urban dwellers to recognize the wide range of services migrants provide, it has also led to the stigmatization of migrants – both in cities, as they transit back home, and in their villages. Such stigma was blatantly played out when returning migrants were sprayed with disinfectants in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Compounding risks – COVID-19, climate change, and livelihood insecurity

Climate hotspots across South Asia will continue to experience the adverse impacts of climate change alongside the current pandemic. In non-pandemic times, migration allowed vulnerable households to move, giving them a chance to diversity livelihoods and deal with climatic risks in their villages. However, the economic repercussions of COVID-19 are projected to shrink economies, curtail growth, and negatively impact sectors like manufacturing and transport that regularly absorb migrants. As the space for migrating shrinks, this key adaptation strategy will become unavailable to households, severely hindering remittances and their capacity to mitigate and manage external risks.

Building on our research, which highlights the importance of migration to a household’s livelihood portfolio, we expect that the absence of a major livelihood diversification option may severely curtail the adaptive capacities of already vulnerable populations. When people who usually migrate are forced to depend on local livelihoods that are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, the risk of increase in chronic poverty can rise in these climate hotspots.

As governments ease lockdowns and explore ways to boost economic growth, this potential of vulnerable people falling into chronic poverty and deprivation looms large. Internal migrants working in the informal sector of economies in South Asia are not easily covered by social protection measures put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. These individuals and their families face destitution brought about by the loss of income over an uncertain period of time.

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This article is also published by ICIMOD.

Ricardo Safra de Campos is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. Chandni Singh is a researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, India. Amina Maharjan is a Livelihoods Specialist on Migration for the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Nepal.

By Dominique Jolivet. At the end of March 2020, the MISTY team was planning to conduct a comparative survey across 5 sites. The outbreak of COVID-19 in most of our research sites compelled us to think out of the box in order to adapt our data collection plans.

One of the themes of the MISTY project deals with identity and cultural dimensions of sustainability. It explores if attitudes and behaviours around economic, social and environmental sustainability change with migration and if migrant populations can play a catalytic role in planning for and collectively engaging in sustainability.

The data collection around this theme started in 2019, when we conducted semi-structured interviews in our 6 research sites – Accra, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dhaka, Maputo and Worcester (US). The main purpose of the qualitative data collection was twofold; (1) to collect novel and unique data on the subjective and contextual meanings of sustainability from the perspective of urban inhabitants, and (2) to provide input for the development of a survey questionnaire. Our sample included people born and raised in the city of residence and people born elsewhere (internal and international migrants).

The comparative survey takes a longitudinal approach and is designed to study changes in sustainable practices (attitudes and behaviours) in individuals’ lives over the life course and the migration trajectory. It examines issues of identity, place attachment, and the potential for migrant and non-migrant populations to be active agents for change. The biosecurity measures taken with the COVID-19 outbreak in the sites under study compelled the project to postpone the fieldwork. It is still uncertain to what extent and when we will be able to conduct the survey in most of the research sites.

Although we still aim to implement the comparative survey as soon as possible, we have designed three additional data collection instruments to ensure that we can test some of the initial hypothesis envisaged in the comparative survey. Additionally, the three instruments will allow us to better understand the effect of the COVID-19 crisis in sustainable practices (behaviour and attitudes) considering two factors. On the one hand, the fact that the global health crisis amplifies social inequality. On the other hand, the emergence of new opportunities for participation in alternative citizen-led initiatives emerged in reaction to the shortcomings of the state to face the COVID-19 crisis, for instance, to provide assistance to vulnerable populations, support the local economy or provide equipment to health care professionals.

With the new instruments we will collect qualitative and quantitative data:

Second wave of semi-structured interviews to the same participants

The unique and fortuitous position of MISTY is to have baseline qualitative data from the first wave, collected before the COVID-19 outbreak. Similarly to the first wave of interviews, the design involves comparative data collection to examine common processes across places with diverse migration profiles and histories. By re-interviewing some of participants of first wave cohort, the analysis will document how does the COVID-19 crisis affect practices (perceptions, attitudes and behaviours) related to security, mobility, distance and isolation, sustainable consumption, and community in migrant and non-migrant populations. Sub-questions are:

• Are migrants perceived as a threat and stigmatised or marginalised due to the biosecurity dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis?
• What are the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis in terms of community building, place attachment, identity formation and social participation?
• What are the implications of the COVID-19 crisis in the livelihoods of migrant and non-migrants and how do they affect migration aspirations and decisions?

The data collection via videoconference and mobile phone started in June 2020 and has been completed in most of our research sites.

Online survey in Amsterdam

Keeping the planned longitudinal approach of the comparative survey, we have designed an online panel survey in collaboration with OIS Amsterdam, the research department of the Municipality of Amsterdam that collects data on Amsterdam inhabitants on topics such as employment, housing, safety, health care or education. OIS surveys are sometimes collected online among a panel of Amsterdam residents. The panel includes inhabitants with a migration background -first generation and second generation migrants. In 2017, OIS Amsterdam conducted a survey on sustainable practices (attitudes and behaviours) among 1400 panel participants, out of which more than 950 are currently active members. We added cases to the panel component in order to collect the second wave survey among 2800 respondents and the 2017 dataset will be used as the baseline. The online survey partially builds on the research questions of the initially planned comparative survey and asks in the context of Amsterdam:

• To what extent Amsterdammers with or without migration background have adopted more or less sustainable practices between 2017 and 2020 in Amsterdam?
• What is the effect of particular life stages linked to migration, parenthood, main activity and citizenship on sustainable practices of Amsterdam residents?
• Has the COVID-19 crisis led to reconfigurations in sustainable practices (attitudes and behaviours) and views on what are the most important components of sustainability?
• What is the effect of the COVID-19 crisis in migration and mobility practices?

The implementation of the survey started in mid-July 2020.

Telephone survey in Bangladesh

MISTY partner RMMRU, in collaboration with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, is conducting a longitudinal project to study the effect of migration on poverty and development in Bangladesh through a panel survey. Over a period of 10 years, the panel survey collects data among three types of households – without migrant members, with internal migrants and with (short-term) international migrants. The third wave of data collection (IMPD 3) will start in August 2020 and will include a short module with open- and closed-ended questions designed by MISTY to explore the meaning of sustainability in different contexts and the effect of COVID-19 in the household. Drawing on the questions designed for the online survey in Amsterdam, the data collected will allow us to explore:

• What does sustainability mean in different rural contexts in Bangladesh?
• To what extent meanings of sustainability differ between households with and without migrant members?
• Has the COVID-19 crisis led to changes in the level of interest in sustainability issues?
• What are the effects of the COVID-19 crisis in the households and in their migration and mobility practices?

In August 2020, while we keep planning the comparative survey, we will start the analysis of the data collected in times of Coronavirus.