The perfect (shit)storm: Discourses around the proposal to introduce a ‘climate passport’ in Germany

Sarah Louise Nash

Environment and Planning C, 2024, vol. 42, issue 6, 941-957

Abstract: Since 2017 a debate has been ongoing in Germany around a proposal by the Green Party to introduce a ‘climate passport’ that would confer citizenship-like rights to people most likely to be displaced due to climate change. The debate, ranging from solidaristic work to open hostility, is highly Eurocentric, with the German border and affected people’s potential interactions with it providing a central ordering node in the debate. German voices and perspectives are foregrounded, and Germany is placed in a problem-solver position in relation to affected communities. By doing so, the positioning of Germany as able to control and define future acceptable human mobilities is centred. Affected people are positioned as the ‘other,’ which oscillates between Pacific Islanders and Africans depending on the speaker. Inhabitants of Pacific Islands are identified as recipients of the climate passport, as vulnerable individuals whose countries will inevitably be erased from the map by climate change. Africans, on the other hand, are portrayed as economic migrants waiting to take advantage of climate-related residency permits to migrate to Europe. Based on this analysis, I argue that the Eurocentrism of well-intentioned policy proposals to protect people forced to move in the context of climate change is a blind spot in policy circles and research that demands further attention.

Keywords: Climate change; climate passport; migration; Germany; Eurocentrism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23996544231216015 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:42:y:2024:i:6:p:941-957

DOI: 10.1177/23996544231216015

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().