Climate precarity and the mobilities of rural youth: land, politics, and labour in southern Ethiopia

Climate change does not primarily produce migrants. It produces precarity, a political economic condition in which labour insecurity, social reproduction stress, and uneven climate exposure compound one another, and mobilities are among the principal pathways through which that precarity is configured, circulated, and reproduced across rural-urban space. Drawing on qualitative interviews with policymakers, academics, and young smallholders in the Sidama Region of southern Ethiopia, this article advances climate precarity as a still-underdeveloped conceptual complement to climate mobilities scholarship. We show how climate precarity is produced for young male smallholder farmers across three interrelated structural dimensions: capital, through a state-administered land tenure regime embedded in the global political economy of land; politics, through an ethnically federated order that conditions safe and unsafe destinations; and labour, through urban accumulation, informal employment, and bureaucratic invisibility. Mobilities and precarity, we argue, are mutually constitutive and site-specific: mobilities transport precarity from countryside to city, while precarity simultaneously conditions who can move, where, and on what terms. The article reframes mobilities as socially produced and institutionally mediated processes through which inequality is reproduced and calls for policy responses that address the structural conditions that render movement necessary, constrained, and unequal.