The impact of uncertainty and institutional design: UNHCR and IOM's competing discourses on climate change-related mobility

Expanding into the climate change regime in the 2000s, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have become the primary policy actors in the emerging issue area of climate migration and displacement. Despite their key positions in shaping the emerging policy norms, UNHCR and IOM's discourses on climate change-related mobility are under-researched. As this thesis shows, they conceptualize the relationship between climate change and human mobility in differing ways, endorse different terminologies and promote competing policy objectives. This thesis aims to explain why UNHCR and IOM adopt different discourses on climate change-related mobility and discuss their implications for the emerging regime for its global governance in terms of climate justice. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis as its method to study primary sources from UNHCR and IOM. By drawing on constructivist and historical institutionalist treatments of international organizations (IOs), it highlights the role of issue-specific and institutional factors. The findings suggest that coupled with the absence of an international norm and a clear delegation from member states, the uncertainty and ambiguity regarding the relationship between climate change and human mobility provide IOs a wider room for interpretation. Yet, IOs' institutional contexts (e.g. their mandates, funding structures, degrees of autonomy and previous policy standards) constrain the boundaries of imaginable and acceptable discourses when deliberating policy ideas in a new issue area beyond their core mandates.