Rural migrants as catalysts for host community adaptation: Innovation, collective action, and economic development

Abstract

Climate migration research is increasingly analyzing migration's implications for adaptation. However, despite broad recognition that climate change is already exacerbating rural-to-urban migration in many countries in the Global South, especially into vulnerable communities in informal settlements, migration's effects on these communities' vulnerability and adaptive capacity have received limited attention. To begin addressing this gap, we conduct semi-structured interviews with official community leaders in Dar es Salaam's Ilala flood-prone district to elicit their views of migration's effects on flooding and the potential responses to these effects. To this end, we focus on how migration influences three critical determinants of informal communities' vulnerability and adaptive capacity: innovation, collective action, and economic development. The findings show that community leaders perceive rural migrants as mainly enhancing adaptive capacity, yet also identify various effects aggravating vulnerability across the studied dimensions. Although only some leaders view migrants as innovation agents, they highlighted innovation's significant adaptive effects. However, migrants are widely perceived as contributing to collective action vis-à-vis flooding, and, particularly, to economic development that enhances communities' and households' flood preparedness and recovery, as well as boosting collective action and innovation. We also find that community leaders' preferred responses to migration are based on harnessing their communities' social capital, albeit in collaboration with higher-tier urban authorities. We conclude by highlighting communities' economies as potentially crucial spheres for formulating interventions to enhance migration's adaptive effects, and by underscoring the need to adopt community-centered approaches that maximize migration's contribution to adaptation.