'Ecobordering': casting immigration control as environmental protection. Issue 1 (2nd January 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Turner, Joe; Bailey, Dan
• Is Part Of: Environmental politics. Volume 31:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 110
• Page End: 131
• Publication Date: 2022-01-02
• Subjects: Borders -- anti-immigration -- far right parties -- environmental protection -- climate denialism -- climate migration; Environmental policy -- Periodicals; Environmental protection -- Periodicals; Ecology -- Periodicals; Green movement -- Periodicals; 333.72
• DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2021.1916197
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0964-4016

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Based on an analysis of 22 European far-right parties, we identify an emergent discourse in environmental politics, which we conceptualise as 'ecobordering'. This discourse seeks to blame immigration for national environmental degradation, which draws on colonial and racialised imaginaries of nature in order to rationalise further border restrictions and 'protect' the 'nativist stewardship' of national nature. As such, ecobordering seeks to obscure the primary driving causes of the ecological crisis in the entrenched production and consumption practices of Global North economies, whilst simultaneously shifting blame on to migration from the Global South where ecological degradation has been most profound. In an era of increasing climate migration, ecobordering thereby portrays effects as causes and further normalises racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe.