Unequal Adaptive Capacities: How Social Stratification and Flood Risk Shape Individual and Household Migration Behavior

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 5. Decision to Migrate

Abstract

As climate change intensifies environmental stress, migration is increasingly recognized as a household adaptive strategy. Yet existing scholarship often treats individual and household migration as distinct phenomena, obscuring how the same structural forces may channel different groups toward different migration modalities. Drawing on sequential migration theory, I conceptualize migration modality as a spectrum (from immobility to individual migration to household relocation) that reflects a household's position along an adaptive–distress continuum. Using longitudinal data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) linked to a flood risk map developed by the Nepal Development Research Institute, I examine how flood susceptibility shapes migration modality across systems of social stratification in Chitwan, Nepal between 2008 and 2016. Preliminary findings indicate that while most residents do not migrate regardless of flood risk, migration modality is systematically stratified by flood susceptibility, caste, and gender, patterns consistent with an adaptive–distress continuum in which social hierarchies shape not just whether people move, but how. I engage with emerging scholarship on environmental casteism to argue that these patterns are not incidental but are produced through historically embedded systems of stratification that structure exposure, resources, and mobility, a claim I interrogate further using a discrete-time competing risks event history model with household and neighborhood controls.

Author

• Aryaa Rajouria, University of Washington