Migration trajectories and environmental risk: A case study from Albay, Philippines

One of the anticipated impacts of climate change is a change in migration patterns on local, national and even international scales. While the nature and extent of this change is the subject of growing policy and academic interest, the environmental migration literature continues to suffer from a lack of theoretically grounded conceptual frameworks. Using metatheoretical discussions of the relationship between structure and agency, the paper outlines an analytical framework, which seeks both to explain and describe how environmental factors may shape migration. These theoretical discussions are explored in a case study of migration patterns from Albay province, Philippines.  Findings reveal the importance of seeing migration as a process, the result of dialectical relationships between actors and structural processes of economic, political, social, cultural and environmental change.