Beyond Existing Categories: Social Realities and Legal Gaps in Climate-Induced Internal Displacement in Saint-Louis du Sénégal
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v19n3p827-842Abstract
Climate-induced displacement in Saint-Louis du Sénégal exposes a tension between the lived reality of slow-onset environmental deterioration and legal and policy categories often oriented toward more readily identifiable displacement events. Coastal erosion, tidal incursions, salinization, and livelihood degradation have not produced a single moment of rupture, but a gradual contraction of the conditions that make life in place possible.
Drawing on a desk-based interdisciplinary analysis of published scholarship, legal instruments, jurisprudence, and institutional materials, this article examines whether existing categories adequately capture slow-onset climate-related internal displacement. It advances three claims. First, declining habitability is socially produced and experienced unevenly through housing precarity, livelihood disruption, and differentiated vulnerability. Second, displacement can remain partial and relational, as relocated households maintain economic and social ties to the coast. Third, a protection gap can emerge when existing frameworks are operationalized too late or too narrowly to address incremental displacement.
Rather than proposing a new legal status, the article develops the internally climate-displaced person (ICDP) as an interpretive and operational tool within existing protection frameworks. The concept foregrounds incremental causation, continuing attachment to place, anticipatory protection, and differentiated vulnerability, framing climate-related internal displacement as a long-term question of protection, citizenship, and justice.
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