Staying despite disaster risks: Place attachment, voluntary immobility and adaptation in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains

Individuals threatened by environmental risks may choose migration as a survival or adaptation strategy. However, various factors such as attachment to place may encourage immobility despite disaster risks. Since the collapse of the USSR, residents of Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains have faced significant political and socioeconomic difficulties and been exposed to environmental hazards such as floods, rockslides, landslides, and avalanches. These hazards put human security, infrastructure, food security, and accessibility to mountainous areas at risk and call into question aspirations to remain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Bartang Valley, this article addresses immobility in a context of changes and risks. The concept of place attachment is used to explore people-place relationships, voluntary immobility and in-situ adaptation. Results show that place attachment is shaped by cultural, socioeconomic, ecological, and historical variables and that the relationship between place attachment and mobility is complex. The strong place attachment of the Bartangis influences immobility aspirations, short-distance displacements, and return after international out-migration. Findings suggest a mutually reinforcing relation between place attachment, immobility aspirations, and adaptive capacity to disasters, which points to a need for more attention to voluntary immobility and people-place relationships within environmental mobilities research.