Political Ecologies of Refuge and Belonging at the Border

• In Event: Borders, Bodies, and Security: Climate Change and Global Inequality

Abstract

As climate change intensifies environmental stress in regions experiencing displacement, refugees are frequently portrayed as drivers of ecological degradation and resource scarcity, particularly in securitized border zones. Such narratives frame refugee–host tensions as inevitable outcomes of expanded populations competing over limited natural resources. This article challenges that assumption by examining Alacrán Barrio Santuario in Tijuana as a site of environmental peacebuilding in practice.
Alacrán, developed through sustained collaboration between residents, local organizers, designers, and the UC San Diego Center on Global Justice, operates not as a temporary humanitarian shelter but as a place-based climate adaptation initiative embedded within a broader neighborhood ecology. Through terracing, watershed restoration, native vegetation planting, water harvesting, composting, and productive landscape systems, the project transforms degraded hillsides into shared environmental infrastructure. These interventions address climate vulnerability while fostering cooperative stewardship across migrant and host communities.
Drawing on environmental peacebuilding theory and the MAST framework (Mitigation, Adaptation, Societal Transformation), the article demonstrates how shared management of land, water, and ecological systems can generate forms of contact, institutional engagement, and collective belonging. In doing so, it extends environmental peacebuilding scholarship to refugee–host relations in highly securitized border regions and reframes climate change not as a demographic threat but as a shared political–ecological condition.
By centering Alacrán as a collaborative, university–community partnership, the article shows how border adaptation initiatives can simultaneously advance ecological resilience and more durable forms of social inclusion, transforming refuge from a humanitarian exception into a cooperative, infrastructural practice of urban co-development.

Author

• Sevin Gulfer Sagnic, University of California-San Diego