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Spatio-temporal migration patterns to and from an upland village of Mindanao, Philippines

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Abstract

Movement of groups of people is closely linked to environmental, agricultural and cultural change. Gaining an understanding of these changes in a local context is a vital prelude to the construction of a viable predictive model. We carried out a study in the Philippines to better understand the association between migration and these types of changes at a village scale and to build a picture of how the associations changed in time and space. The study area was located in the uplands of Mindanao. Migration to the village began in the late 1970s. As of 2010, the population is made up of indigenous people (~57 %), people who migrated from elsewhere in the Philippines (~29 %), and descendants of indigenous/non indigenous parents (~14 %). Face-to-face interviews in the village and in the places of origin/destination were used to collect qualitative information on the migrations made by the current and past village inhabitants. The main results relate to the reasons for migration, the socio-environmental processes that induced the decision to move and the description and explanation of more recent moves. The local findings are discussed in the context of existing published models of migration in frontier areas.

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Notes

  1. The Philippines is divided into, from the highest division to the lowest: ‘regions’, ‘provinces’, ‘municipalities’, ‘barangays’. Sitios and puroks are communities that are not recognized as a Local Government Unit (LGU).

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to the Belgian Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) for part-funding the research project Modeling Agrarian and Population Dynamics in the Philippines (MAPDIP). The authors are also grateful to two research assistants, Jenifer Ogania and Aili Gatuslao, for their invaluable help in the collection of primary and secondary data. The authors thank anonymous reviewers for insightful and constructive comments and suggestions. Conor Cahill, a native English speaker, was employed to review a late draft of this paper.

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The experiments comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Namur, 61 rue de Bruxelles, Namur, Belgium

    F. Mialhe, N. Dendoncker, L. Richelle & S. Henry

  2. Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC), Ateneo de Manila University, Manila Observatory Bldg., Quezon City, Philippines

    P. Walpole & E. Bruno

  3. Department of Geography, University of Lyon 2 Lumière, UMR 5600 EVS, Lyon, France

    F. Mialhe

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  1. F. Mialhe
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Correspondence to F. Mialhe.

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Mialhe, F., Walpole, P., Bruno, E. et al. Spatio-temporal migration patterns to and from an upland village of Mindanao, Philippines. Popul Environ 36, 155–179 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-014-0213-4

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