Just over 10 years ago I joined the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) as a researcher. Almost immediately, I found myself immersed in an unexpectedly rich stream of work on migration and rural transformation.
In November 2015, under the Water, Land and Ecosystem program, we launched research into why Migration Matters and MARIS — a platform for a policy community with a shared interest in putting migration at the forefront of global agricultural research — at a meeting in Delhi, India. The meeting explored a deceptively simple question: how do rural households use mobility to cope with environmental and economic stress? At the time, migration still sat awkwardly at the margins of agricultural development research — acknowledged, yes, but rarely treated as a central organizing lens for understanding how households adapt to water scarcity, climate variability or shifting rural labor markets.
Our early work challenged existing framing. Migration was not evidence of system failure; it was a strategy within rural systems. Where opportunities emerged, people moved. Where institutions faltered, they moved differently. Where environmental pressures mounted, people moved in ways increasingly shaped by risk, constraint and uncertainty. Migration, in other words, was and remains an intrinsic part of development — not just an aberration or only a desperate last resort.
These insights flowed directly into our involvement in the project AGRUMIG — Leaving Something Behind which focused on migration governance and agricultural and rural change in “home” communities. With funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and led by SOAS University of London, UK we helped shape and deliver the policy engagement dimension including a final key policy meeting in Brussels.
AGRUMIG made a simple but important point: migration governance only works when it is grounded in local realities. Across 19 research sites in China, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal and Thailand the project showed how rural households combine migration and agriculture in flexible — sometimes fragile — ways; how remittances can strengthen but also strain local social contracts; and how persistent policy incoherence between agriculture, labor, social protection and local governance undermines sustainable outcomes.
COVID-19 forced us to adapt quickly, and what we found was telling: despite assumptions that the pandemic would be a major migration “reset”, although there were severe disruptions, the post-COVID-19 situation confirmed how deeply mobility is woven into people’s everyday lives.
At a Brussels policy event in December 2022, we argued something that still feels urgent: the European migration debate can only benefit from the grounded insights of communities outside Europe — whether in Nepal’s mid-hills, Ethiopia’s highlands, Morocco’s river basins or the labor corridors of Central Asia. Migration needs to be normalized in development discourse and treated as an essential process, not as a policy aberration to contain, control or potentially constrain.
In November this year, sitting once again in Brussels for the EU Migration Research at 10 Years conference, these ideas came flooding back. But the research and policy landscape has shifted — and keeps shifting.
Climate mobility is getting more complex, not less
The conference opened with a sober assessment: climate pressures — from droughts to floods — are already reshaping mobility patterns across continents. Some people are being displaced. Others move pre-emptively. Many lack the resources to move at all.
It echoed what we saw in AGRUMIG: mobility is never linear. It is conditioned by inequality, access to resources, gender, generational roles and the strength — or weakness — of local institutions.
The EU now treats climate-linked mobility as a core research frontier. That is welcome, but only if we resist narrowing the lens by too much. The unruliness of climate disruption is one determinant among many; political engagement, food and income insecurity, and deep cultural and gendered norms also shape critical migration decisions, especially by the young.
In short, migration sits within a migration complex that demands a wider systemic view.
AI has arrived — forcefully—and not only as a research tool
A second striking theme was the centrality of AI — not as a futuristic add-on but as a structural force reshaping labor markets, skills systems, geopolitics and research methods.
Satellite imagery, predictive modeling and mobility datasets offer powerful new insights, but cost, access and regulation remain real barriers. More fundamentally, digital inclusion lags far behind digital innovation.
This raises a difficult question: how will automation reshape migration needs? No-one has a clear answer.
Yet for institutions like IWMI working in the Global South, the implications are immediate. AI-driven labor shifts in Europe and elsewhere reverberate through migration corridors, altering opportunities, incentives and vulnerabilities at source. They also change the research landscape itself — how data is generated, who controls it, and who can use it.
Migration politics are no longer only about migration
The session on migration narratives cut closest to the bone. Researchers embedded in Europe’s migration research community — social geographers, anthropologists, economists and others — stressed how migration debates have become entangled with deeper anxieties: inequality, insecurity, demographic change, cultural identity.
But another layer surfaced: unresolved historical legacies. In parts of the EU, and in the UK, “migration debates” can become proxies for debates about multiculturalism, race, colonial memory and economic frustration. And this is deeply unsettling territory for diaspora communities, in particular.
As I argued during the discussion, migration skepticism cannot be separated from these deeper currents, some of which are feeding wider far-right narratives on European isolationism and nativism. Europe must face this honestly and bring strong research-based evidence to the table, or debates will remain stuck in cycles of scapegoating, selective empathy and echo chambers — leaving our collective history in neighboring regions and further afield to be forgotten. For researchers, this means strengthening equality and inclusion within the research process itself and remembering to apply a historical lens to our work as frequently as possible.
Europe is investing heavily — yet selectively
One message was clear: Europe wants to remain the global anchor for independent migration research. New calls under the Horizon Europe program, the EU’s research and innovation funding program until 2027, talent schemes and mobility programs underline that ambition.
But research risks becoming inward-looking — geared to European policy needs without sufficiently integrating the priorities of the regions that, in future, if not already, are sustaining large areas of Europe’s labor markets and supply chains, and which are rapidly becoming economic powers in their own right.
For IWMI and CGIAR, the opportunity — and responsibility — is clear: to ensure the Global South remains an equal partner in shaping the next decade of migration research.
Understanding climate-linked mobility — beyond climate effects
The day ended on an unexpected note. A pitch competition challenged teams to compress their core message into a sharp, policy-ready statement.
Our pitch drew on diverse sources from the team members, representatives from the World Health Organization, from Save the Children and from academia, including beyond Europe.
I contributed some of the insights from a decade of IWMI’s work — from Migration Matters to AGRUMIG — arguing that climate-linked mobility must be understood through the lived realities of rural households, not through climate crisis narratives alone. In other words, we need to think about the structural challenges people face in their household livelihoods, many of which go beyond the immediacy of climate effects within food systems.
As a team we emphasized the need for global partnership, empirical nuance and grounded community insight if Europe is to read mobility accurately and govern it fairly. That includes establishing local panels and reference groups — both in origin countries and at a local level in Europe — to feed into, help prioritize and reflect on research findings. And to communicate and potentially collaborate amongst themselves.
To our surprise, the message resonated. The audience responded by giving us a resounding thumbs up (via a clapometer!).
Now where does this leave us?
Reflecting during the return to London on Eurostar deep below the Channel, I was struck by how much the migration agenda has changed. It is broader, more political, more digital and more tightly linked to climate resilience and global inequality.
But one insight from earlier work still stands: migration is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be understood — and governed with honesty, coherence and compassion.
As Europe prepares its next multiannual financial framework and recalibrates its migration strategies, the need for grounded, interdisciplinary, globally connected research has never been greater.
AGRUMIG’s core finding that households use migration to buffer risk, diversify income and reinvest in farming — but only when institutions, markets and local governance enable these positive linkages remains central to that conversation. IWMI, as a key bridging research entity across social, physical and environment sciences with feet in many different regions and countries, can and must play a key role in unpacking this complexity and helping to guide future policy making.
Brussels offered an impressive stock take. The next step must be bolder: a debate that moves beyond crisis narratives, confronts historical legacies, and involves local voices. We must more meaningfully engage with the places where migration begins, where it transforms livelihoods, where it ends — and where it will shape development trajectories in the decades ahead.
Oh, and yes — we won the pitch competition!
