FRAMING ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES: EFFECTS OF RESPONSIBILITY ATTRIBUTION, DISASTER PROXIMITY AND POLICY ATTITUDES

Abstract

People displaced by climate change and environmental disasters are currently not covered by international legal frameworks. There are three broad narratives applied in literature to discuss this multi-faceted issue, mainly environmental disruption and climate change, threat to human and national security, and damage and loss of livelihood and property. Mimicking these narratives, this study tests the affect of 4 different frames - Environmental Refugees, Political Refugees, Economic Refugees, and Refugees (control) on responsibility attribution and policy attitudes for people displaced by climate change. The study aims to investigate if certain frames garner more support than others. Through an online experimental design of 230 participants in the US, I also test to see if predispositions of individuals bias their attitudes. My results show that participants in general attribute more responsibility for the wellbeing of the refugees with the individual refugees themselves in comparison to responsibility with the international community. Further, across the frames, the participants expect the US government to take relatively lesser policy action for the refugees than the international community. This policy action is in the form of providing asylum status, safe housing, jobs and development aid for the refugees. I find that the frames significantly differ from the control, with the Environmental Refugees narrative gathering the least support. Predispositions of anti-climate change perceptions, anti-immigration sentiments, previous experience with environmental disasters and political ideology significantly affect individual attitudes. The results are counter-intuitive to the expectation of the frames. The environmental narrative in particular is used by scholars to generate awareness and alarm for policy action, yet receives significantly lower support. These findings are suggestive of the current global resistance to embrace environmental refugees within international legal frameworks. The study is embedded within attribution and issue framing theory. The paper builds on empirical evidence on experimental research and the environmental-migration literature.