What Constitutes Environmental Displacement?: Challenges and Opportunities of Exploring Connections Across Thematically Diverse Areas

As the nascent RRN began to take shape its leadership, including then-director of CRS Susan McGrath, observed a consequential and somewhat surprising gap. While many of the other major thematic areas regarding refugee research—international legal regimes, policy analysis, educational opportunities, and integration initiatives among them—were key thematic areas for the network, environmental issues represented an important new area of both conceptual and practical concern, and largely fell beyond the realm of refugee research proper. As a result, she sought to draw together scholars in this emergent field to help create a new research cluster with an emphasis on networking, interdisciplinarity, and knowledge generation. In this chapter, we explore the successes and challenges of the Environmental Displacement Cluster with a particular focus on four areas—1) the origins and structure of the networking model; 2) making the case for “environmentally induced displacement” as a substantive conceptual field and our main organizing concept; 3) how our cluster enabled other interventions into knowledge production concerning our main organizing concept; and 4) reflections on what has worked in this model and what remain as challenges moving forward.