Climate migration, resilience and adaptation in the Anthropocene: Insights from the migrating Frafra to Southern Ghana

Abstract

Climate-induced indigenous migration has become a radical adaptation vision in the Anthropocene. The article focuses on the problematic of representation of indigenous traditional knowledge and imagination in the Anthropocene, in Frafra ethnic group especially. The article does so by critically examining how indigenous traditional knowledge politicise anthropogenic climate change and migration conceived as a struggle between regimes of governing. It analyses alternative approaches to adaptation and resilience, from the Western scientific knowledge and modernist ontologies, often relying on the engagement of local communities, actively produced through the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality, understood as a relational outcome and contingent relation. I argue that indigenous traditional knowledge approaches to resilience and adaptation in the Anthropocene disrupt, contest and subvert modernist discourses of climate-induced migration. It is suggested that contemporary discourses of resilience and adaptation appear to be drawing to a close as it lacks an adequate agential, transformative and also opening up alternative possibilities.