Globalization and the Environment: Implications for Human Migration

Migration is quickly becoming a salient feature of the globalization of trade, investment, and production. One relatively unexplored way of examining the relationship between globalization and migration is to include the natural environment as a proximate explanation of migration within a global political-economic context. An analytical framework of the relationship between globalization, the environment, and migration is developed by synthesizing concepts derived from the literatures related to the population-environment and globalization-environment nexuses. This framework is then applied to a case study of mineral production in Ghana, which is used to demonstrate the utility of key components of the analytical framework.