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Climate adaptation efforts in the Bengal Delta do not fully integrate migrants, who have moved between rural and urban spaces for decades for diverse reasons that now include the impacts of climate change. Despite the reality of mobile lives in the region, organisations implementing adaptation projects approach circular mobilities as undesirable, against ideals for development. These organisations play a crucial role in shaping how migrants as floating people are considered in such a climate-vulnerable context. Drawing upon a combined 16 months of fieldwork in the Bengal Delta region of India and Bangladesh and using data from in-depth interviews with diverse organisational actors, we find that adaptation projects in this region are mainly designed to keep people in place, as stationary populations in either urban destinations or rural areas of origin. They fail to address the multiplicity of mobilities in the region and neglect compounded vulnerabilities of migrants in the face of intersecting crises such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the findings, we conceptualise and call for a migrant-sensitive approach to adaptation that embraces local complexities of climate-related (im)mobilities and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UN climate negotiations, national delegations cannot contribute equally. Scholars have shown that "developed" countries exert greater influence than "developing" nations. This study examines how these inequalities between delegations materialize under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Drawing on 30 interviews and over 200 hours of observation at five UNFCCC meetings, I ask (1) how are institutional structures in the UNFCCC aligned with normative ideals of national development; (2) how do these ideals impact the experiences of national delegations and their negotiators; and (3) what does this reveal about institutional inequality and privilege in this context? Building on institutional and organizational studies of work and literature on Developmental Ideals, I identify four characteristics of an ideal delegation to the UNFCCC that are based in norms of national development and privileged by the structures of the institution: they are large, English-speaking, equipped with Western scientific and legal expertise, and have the ability to send the same negotiators year after year. I demonstrate how non-normative countries that cannot send an ideal delegation find that the institutional structures prohibit them from engaging effectively. Ultimately, they must develop coping mechanisms to creatively compensate for their systemic disadvantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The People's Climate March (PCM) in September 2014 brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of New York City in an unprecedented outpouring of support for action on climate change. With so much momentum behind it, the PCM made possible related events before and after the March itself. As activists and academics, we discuss the March weekend from the premarch Climate Convergence to the post-march Flood Wall Street protest. We argue that the March weekend brought together a diversity of historically fragmented climate movement actors to recursively strategize the future of the climate movement. This happened through: 1) an open-source model of workshops and panels at the pre-March events; 2) The unbranded and segmented structure of the PCM; 3) the lack of a target; 4) an outlet for radical activists; 5) and a series of incidental contexts opening space for individuals to connect. In deliberately working toward inclusivity, the PCM and the events of the surrounding weekend facilitated simultaneous critique and negotiation of the climate movement's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]