Session 21.1

Beyond Climate Collaborative (BCC) proposes to organize a panel at the WMU Virtual Symposium. This panel invites a interdisciplinary, translocal and cross-sectoral dialogue on climate mobility justice—a framework that repositions mobility not only as a matter of humanitarian crisis response or technical management but as a critical site of justice, decolonization, and transformation. As climate-related displacement, migration, and immobility intensify, so too does the urgency to ask: Who moves? Who doesn’t? Who decides? And what futures are enabled or foreclosed through existing responses?

Rooted in research, organizing, institutional practice, and lived experience, this roundtable will bring together four contributors from different geographic and professional contexts to interrogate dominant approaches to climate mobility and offer alternative pathways grounded in equity, participation, and repair.

The discussion will explore:

• Decolonizing Knowledge and Institutional Responses: How dominant knowledge systems, funding mechanisms, and technical discourses often render local, Indigenous, and experiential knowledge invisible in shaping climate mobility solutions. What would it mean to reframe “capacity building” as a reciprocal, community-led process that respects sovereignty, memory, and place?

• Immobility and the Right to Stay: While climate mobility often foregrounds movement, the roundtable will highlight the politics of staying—why some people choose or are forced to remain, and how justice frameworks can help us rethink support not just for those who move, but for those who don’t.

• Feminist and Intersectional Approaches to Belonging: Drawing on gendered and racialized dynamics of displacement, we will explore how climate-induced migration intersects with social inequalities and systems of oppression. What does just relocation look like for women, LGBTQ+ people, youth, elders, and those in informal labor or land tenure systems?

• Beyond Borders: Reimagining Belonging and Responsibility: The panel will critique the limits of state-centric, border-focused responses and ask how we might build ethical, transnational solidarities and policy frameworks that uphold the rights of climate-affected peoples—especially in formerly colonized regions. We will explore the roles that cities, diasporas, and regional networks can play in co-creating inclusive futures.

This panel builds on a growing body of climate justice scholarship and practice that sees climate mobility not simply as a risk to be managed, but as a symptom of deeper historical injustices and an opportunity for collective reimagination. By convening across boundaries—disciplinary, geographic, institutional—we seek to challenge reductive narratives and build bridges between lived experiences of climate mobility and those shaping the policies meant to address it.

The format will emphasize dialogue over presentation, beginning with brief reflections from each panelist (10 minutes) followed by a facilitated conversation and interactive audience Q&A. Our aim is not only to share knowledge but to co-create new inquiries and solidarities for action.

Intended Outcomes:

• Surface frameworks and practices that center justice, equity, and community agency in climate migration responses

• Promote learning across different types of expertise (academic, lived, policy, grassroots)

• Provide concrete examples of community-led responses and solidarity-based advocacy

• Inspire future research collaborations and networks advancing climate mobility justice