Gendered Immobility in the Context of Environmental Change and Anomalies: Why Women and Men Are Staying in or Returning to Rural Malawi

Monica J. Grant, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Katherine J. Curtis, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Studies of environmental migration continue to mount as populations across the globe confront significant environmental change. Generally, migration represents a last-resort adaptation strategy. More recently, however, scholars have devoted more attention to the case of non-migration among populations confronting environmental change. This line of research suggests immobility also can represent adaptation. Scholars point to a limited literature on non-migration in African contexts and identify growth in such research as a significant need to better inform policy decisions and, we argue, theoretical frameworks of environmental immobility. Focusing on Malawi, we seek to identify the forces most salient among people who have stayed or returned to this subsistence farming context that is vulnerable to ongoing environmental change using a gender lens. Working from the aspirations-abilities framework, we anticipate greater immobility among women given women’s stronger inheritance-based land rights (i.e., matrilineal land inheritance) and the associated pressures to remain in place. We investigate how this anticipated gendered dynamic overlays with respondents’ stated reasons for staying or returning. Preliminary results suggest multiple forces are at play and align with matrilineal land rights and their subsequent orientation to place, illuminating the gendered dynamics of both aspirations and abilities that underly environmental immobility.

Keywords: Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Gender Dynamics

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