This article explores the lived realities of climate-induced internal displacement in Mongolia, focusing on rural-to-urban migration among herding communities. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in 2016 and 2024, it examines how environmental degradation, economic fragility, and policy neglect intersect and influence the mobility of displaced herders who relocate primarily to Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts. While dominant policy and public discourse often frame such movements as voluntary or adaptive, participants’ accounts reveal a gradual erosion of viable livelihoods and a steady narrowing of meaningful choices. The analysis challenges binary distinctions between forced and voluntary migration by situating mobility within longer histories of post-socialist rural disinvestment, infrastructural breakdown, and ecological degradation. Conceptually, the article engages with scholarship on climate mobility, political ecology, and post-socialist urbanism to frame internal displacement as both spatial and epistemic: an unfolding condition that dislocates people from land, skills, and recognition while offering limited pathways to reintegration. These ‘quiet catastrophes’ may remain administratively unnamed and politically marginal, but their impact and consequences are profound. By treating climate-linked displacement as a process of cumulative loss rather than a discrete rupture, the article contributes to broader debates on how internal, incremental mobility is classified, governed and made visible within climate change discourses.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)