Governance of Climate Mobilities in Sweden: Discursive Trajectories, Emerging Trends, and Policy Recommendations

This report examines how Sweden has governed climate-related mobilities (CCM) over the past four decades, arguing that climate change and migration debates have been present but largely marginal and highly fragmented in national politics. Using a climate mobilities lens, it understands CCM as multiple, interconnected forms of movement (displacement, migration, planned relocation, immobility) shaped by social-ecological and political relations, rather than as a linear effect of environmental change. Methodologically, the study combines discourse analysis of around 180 parliamentary and official documents (1980s–2020s) with roughly 40 reports from key agencies and think tanks, plus four expert interviews, to trace discursive trajectories and governance practices across policy fields.

The analysis identifies three main periods. From 1985 to the early 2000s, Swedish debates centred on “environmental refugees”, initially framed as victims in the Global South but quickly linked to European conflicts and Chernobyl, leading to a distinctive clause in the 1989 Aliens Act that provided protection for people displaced by environmental disasters. This phase combined solidarity and historical responsibility narratives with early efforts to embed environmental displacement into refugee law and EU-level cooperation.

From the mid-2000s to 2020, “climate refugees” replaced “environmental refugees” and CCM was increasingly discussed through climate governance and adaptation, often via development cooperation and “climate aid”, with Bangladesh becoming a symbolic hotspot. Sweden sought to present itself as a climate-transition leader, promoting CCM in Nordic and EU arenas, but at home the special legal clause was rarely used and ultimately removed in 2021 to align with EU asylum law, amid a broader shift towards restrictive migration policy.

After 2020, CCM discourses have pluralised but remain scattered across migration/asylum, development cooperation, and climate adaptation, with growing emphasis on climate aid, security, and preparedness, and a new tendency to fold CCM into green-transition labour needs. Internal climate-related (im)mobilities within Sweden are only weakly acknowledged, mainly as short-term evacuation rather than as structural mobility or displacement.

The report concludes that Swedish CCM governance is contingent and shaped by shifting interactions between refugee governance, development aid, and environmental policy, with no single institution clearly responsible. It warns that current trajectories risk “developmentalising” and technocratising CCM, sidelining protection and rights, and calls for more coherent, rights-based and multi-scalar approaches, including renewed legal innovation, stronger EU–Nordic cooperation, explicit integration of (im)mobilities into climate and development policy, and support for intersectional, agency-centred research on climate mobilities.