Lunch Lecture - Patrick Sakdapolrak

Translocal Resilience. Environmental Change, Migration and Social Resilience in Rural Thailand.

Climate change and migration are drawing increasing interest from researchers and policy makers, as well as from the general public. The paper offers a fresh perspective on the climate change-migration nexus. It starts from the assumption that, regardless of the accuracy of the projections of future environmental changes, migration is already occurring and will continue to be a major dynamic of global change. Migration is connecting people, transforming places, and facilitating flows of knowledge and resources, and thus creating networked and interconnected translocal spaces. This translocal connectedness has the potential to strengthen the social resilience of risk-exposed households. The paper will outline the conceptual approach and present empirical results from field research in rural North and Northeast Thailand.