Moving beyond stereotypes : the role of gender in the environmental change and human mobility nexus

Women are often assumed to be most vulnerable to environmental risk and climate change because of often-experienced constraints in mobility. A common-held assumption is that women are fixated in place and experience forced immobility in the context of environmental change, whilst the men can move to other places. In building on feminist and mobilities scholarship, this article critically interrogates this assumption and seeks to move towards a more plural understanding of gender-environment-mobility relations. Through a study of human mobility in coastal Bangladesh, we interrogate what it means for women to stay in places of environmental and climate risk and how staying may hamper or enhance small-scale mobilities. We also examine how labour mobilities by women get increased when moving to urban settlements as a response to environmental changes and lack of work in rural areas. In this manner, we demonstrate how gender-environment-mobility relations do not play out uniformly but are shaped by wider im/mobilities and specific social and environmental contexts.