Pluralising environmental immobility: Diverse staying strategies in the face of environmental change in the Bengal Delta

Abstract Immobility in contexts of environmental and climate change has gained increasing importance in the environmental mobilities research field, with staying decisions typically characterised in the binary terms of voluntariness and involuntariness. This paper explores, first, how it may be analytically complex to retain binary understandings of immobility by showing how staying preferences can be marked by both choice and constraints. Second, it explores a wider understanding of voluntariness in immobility decisions, as one moving beyond the simple idea of non-coercion to account for the ends that staying serves in people’s life projects, and their access to subjectively defined alternatives. Empirically, it draws on a qualitative study in the deltaic island of Mousuni in eastern India, where recurring cyclones, coastal floods and erosion threaten smallholder agrarian livelihoods. Moving beyond a binary characterisation, it offers a differentiated understanding of staying preferences by identifying intermedial immobility categories that reflect subjective narratives surrounding how people cope with land and livelihood losses, ties to home and community, intra-household divisions of labour, and local perceptions of a ‘good life’.