Climate-Induced Migration: The Evaluation of Terms in a European Commission Institutional Genre Network

Climate change and mobility have been contentious and divisive issues in international scientific debate and politics in the last three decades. Scientists and governments have applied different sets of logics and priorities to climate change over time, ranging from the frontline of climate change supporters to skeptics. As a consequence, the terms related to climate change have greatly expanded and present a high degree of instability, which is typical of new term formation and knowledge (Nerlich and Koteyko 2009). On the other hand, the debate on migration and displacement is bound by shared and established terms based on international legal frameworks, which are nevertheless at the center of contestation (Catenaccio 2007). The chapter explores the specific case of environmental and climate-induced migration and displacement in European Commission institutional discourse, for it has been populated by some of the most emblematic and contested terms of the recent debate on the nexus of climate change and migration. Denominations such as environmental refugees and climate refugees have been heavily criticized by legal scholars (McAdam 2012), who warn against their use as they are not recognized by key legal texts such as the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951). Nevertheless such terms, with their emblematic and evocative charge, have increasingly come under the EU political and media spotlight as they provide an embodiment and a human face to diverging opinions on climate change, adaptation, and resilience (Russo 2017b). Term choice related to the case of climate-induced migration is particularly relevant for the analysis of the many and often contradictory rhetorical and ideological strategies of EU institutional actors (Carta and Wodak 2015: 1). As Carta and Wodak have recently noted, “Within the EU, all institutions represent relevant EU public actors, whether on the ground of territorial (e.g. national) or functional (e.g. the European Commission or the European External Action Service) representativeness” (2015: 2). Yet, in order to speak with one voice, a complex network of term cooperation projects and sharing has been established by EU institutions for internal and external communication (Maslias 2017). In fact, new EU policies, measures and actions often emphasize the important balance between knowledge management and popularization in term choice. In the case of climate change, the domain greatly expanded in the inter-institutional terminology database, Inter-Active Terminology for Europe (IATE). Yet considering the inconsistent representation of related terms in thesauri and databases, the EU Commission created the European Climate Adaptation Glossary (Faber et al. 2006: 190; Russo 2017a). Conversely, while the debate on climate-induced migration has been prominent in expert and non-expert debates, climate-induced migration terms are not represented in EU glossaries, leaving users confused by IATE entries 131506 and 3506801, which include several variants and term notes, environmental refugee, eco-refugee, environmental migrant, environment-related migrant as broader terms for the definition “People who left their homes following natural and manmade disasters”, and climate refugees and climate migrants for the narrower definition “Person displaced by climatically induced environmental disasters”. Following this line of thought, the present study employs Corpus Linguistics tools combined with Discourse Analysis to consider term variation in the European Commission institutional genre network (Baker 2006). The chapter analyses how the choice of newly formed terms may be analysed in terms of evaluation in discourse, which may concur in determining variation, incoherence and uncertainty (Martin and White 2005). In order to test how the terms are appraised by the European Commission discourse community, a study has been carried out by comparing occurrences in a diachronic corpus (1996-2016), specifically compiled to represent different interrelated discourse genres (Swales 1990).