This thesis seeks to better conceptualise how and why there is an absence of international protection for ???environmental refugees???, and to place these findings in the critical geopolitics literature. A poststructuralist framework, drawing on Foucault???s ideas of discourse, subjectivity, power and governance, was deemed most appropriate for this thesis, and provided a means of differentiation from previous literature on ???environmental refugees???. This thesis develops a genealogy of the subject category of ???environmental refugees??? since the 1970s, to better understand how the United Nations, Inter-Governmental Organisations (IGOs), Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and the media have constructed environmental issues and refugees in texts. Fieldwork undertaken in 2004 enabled me to conduct 45 semistructured interviews with United Nations diplomats and representatives from IGOs and NGOs. Critical scrutiny of these interview texts revealed the constructions of ???environmental refugees??? as various subject identities, particularly in relation to climate change. Pacific ambassadors to the United Nations were also interviewed in 2004 to explore how they negotiated discourses on climate change and ???environmental refugees???, and attempted to articulate their concerns at the United Nations. This thesis contends that an absence of policy at the United Nations to protect ???environmental refugees??? has been produced by a combination of discursive and institutional politics. Unequal power structures at the United Nations have limited the capacity of small island states to lobby and articulate concerns, while subject categories of ???environmental refugees??? have been constructed in ways that alter the terms of debate, evade legal response, or deflect blame away from the perpetrators of environmental damage. Reasons for this policy absence have been the shifting attitudes towards environmental issues and the role of multilateral political institutions. The overall contribution of this thesis is to critical geopolitics, through its examination of the role of multilateralism, representations of environmental issues causing population displacement, and how and why policy absences are created within multilateral institutions such as the United Nations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187204 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | McNamara, Karen Elizabeth, School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Science, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Science |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Karen Elizabeth McNamara, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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