Abstract :
[en] When studying the multi-causality of human (im)mobility, environmental changes are increasingly identified as primary migration or displacement drivers (IDMC, 2019). At the same time, the minimalist perspective suggests that the situation is in fact more complex and that environmental drivers interact with economic, social, demographic and political factors in shaping migration decision-making and trajectories (Suhrke, 1993; Hugo, 1996). As such, we must acknowledge the existence of a continuum between the different drivers and patterns of mobility. Focusing on the “new mobilities” paradigm (Sheller and Urry, 2006), which cuts across a wide range of disciplines and centres on the study of the movement itself, rather than on its drivers, it seems relevant to connect the concept of ‘fragmented journeys’ to environmentally-induced mobility. This can be done by interrogating the extent to which environmental factors (both sudden-onset and slow-onset) influence contemporary mixed migration flows and pathways in both space and time, from areas of origin to areas of transit and/or destination, throughout different migration phases, as opposed to analysing them as mere drivers of initial outward mobility. This is the aim of the MIGRADAPT project, which uses the concept of fragmented journeys as one of its founding hypotheses, suggesting that environmental factors (and the perceptions of them), in their interaction with socio-economic factors, play a role throughout migrants’ fragmented journeys to Europe – and more specifically to Belgium.
