PREFER

Leaving to Stay: Youth Migration and Family Continuity in Coastal Bến Tre

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-21T20:41:49Z

Leaving to Stay: Youth Migration and Family Continuity in Coastal Bến Tre

Authors:
Thi Minh ha Bui, UVSQ
Jean-Paul Vanderlinden, UVSQ
Charlotte da Cunha, UVSQ
Abstract:
This paper examines how young people and households in the coastal zone of former Bến Tre Province navigate socio-ecological transformation through overseas labour migration while seeking to maintain family continuity, local attachment, and socially valued ways of life. It draws on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2026, combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews, walking ethnography, and extended immersion in everyday coastal life.
The study situates migration within a rapidly changing coastal environment shaped by salinity intrusion, fisheries decline, hydraulic engineering, renewable-energy development, and infrastructural transformation. Rather than interpreting migration solely as an economic response to environmental or labour-market pressures, it argues that mobility is embedded within broader moral grammars through which households evaluate continuity, obligation, and future possibilities under conditions of uncertainty. Using the concepts of terminal change and principles, values, and ethics, the paper reconstructs how migration decisions are morally justified and socially negotiated.
The analysis shows that migration - particularly to Japan - is widely understood not as a rupture with local belonging but as a means of sustaining family continuity. Decisions are shaped by emic values including filial piety, familial reciprocity, care, intergenerational obligations, and ancestor continuity. The paper contributes to debates on migration, socio-ecological transformation, and the moral foundations of adaptation by showing how mobility can simultaneously enable profound change and reinforce valued forms of continuity.

A note on restitution, narrative intervention and outreach

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-21T20:10:00Z

Over the past twenty years, I have developed with my colleagues what I now name transdisciplinary narrative interventions as a way of working with stories in research. In PREFER, we have mobilised this approach as part of the way we conduct research and engage with the communities involved.

The starting point is quite simple. Narrative methods produces stories. Through interviews, life stories, films, photographs, conversations and other forms of fieldwork, we gather stories about people, places and the changes they are going through. But these stories do not belong only (at all) to the research project. They can also become resources for the people and communities who have shared them with us.

The way we implement this varies from place to place. Sometimes we work with people to produce a film or a song (San Miguel de Sema and Nugatsiaq for instance. Sometimes we produce books of local stories, as we are doing in Tiệm Tôm and Venecia, or work towards an illustrated book about the development of Phú Lễ. We are also exploring children's books and other forms that can remain in the communities and circulate beyond the research itself.

There is no particular moment at which restitution has to happen. In some cases, something is produced before another stage of research; in others, it comes out of the research process; sometimes it happens after the fieldwork. What matters is that it is part of the relationship, rather than something added at the end because the project has to “give something back”.

This is important to me. Restitution is not transactional. A book, a film or a song is not compensation for someone's participation in research. The point is rather to create something together, or to return something in a form that can have a life of its own. What this means in terms of respect, empowerment or emancipation is necessarily local. We cannot decide this in advance from the university.

This is also why I consider narrative intervention part of both the method and the ethics of PREFER. The intervention changes what happens during the research, what stories can circulate, and sometimes what questions can subsequently be asked. At the same time, it makes us responsible for what happens to the stories that people have entrusted to us.

There is, finally, another dimension to these restitutions. They are also a way of reaching audiences beyond the communities with whom we work. The stories of Tiệm Tôm or Phú Lễ, for example, can be resources locally while also allowing people elsewhere to discover how a place has changed, what matters to its inhabitants, and what we are learning from working there.

So the things presented in this section have several lives. Some are primarily for local use, some are research outputs, and some are also outreach. Often they are all three. What connects them is the idea that research should not only take stories out of places; it should also create possibilities for stories to travel back into them, and beyond them. Please keep this in mind when visiting this section

October 2026 blog post: coming soon!

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-21T09:56:00Z

We will tell stories of Uummannaq fieldwork

PREFER in a nutshell

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-21T09:24:00Z

What happens when people are confronted with the possibility that the world they know and value may no longer be?
This is the starting point of PREFER, an ERC-funded research project exploring how people and communities experience and respond to situations that they perceive as potentially terminal - situations in which something that matters deeply to them may disappear, be irreversibly transformed, or cease to be possible.

We often talk about existential risks in terms of their global scale: climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, nuclear war, or technological risks. PREFER approaches the question from another direction. It begins with particular places, particular communities and particular lives, and asks what existential risk looks like when experienced from the ground.
The project uses the idea of Local Terminal Risk (LTRisk) to explore situations in which the future, the continuity, of a community, a place, a relationship, a way of life or a set of values comes into question. What makes such situations especially revealing is that they are not simply moments of material loss. They are also moments in which people have to make difficult judgements: What matters most? What can be given up? What must be defended? What do we owe to others? And what kind of future is still worth pursuing?
PREFER seeks answers to these questions through long-term, place-based research. Fieldwork has taken us to Vietnam, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland's endonym) and Colombia, among other places, and has involved interviews, life stories, ethnographic observation and walking alongside people as they experience and interpret profound changes in their surroundings and circumstances.
But the project is not only interested in what researchers can observe. It is equally concerned with how people themselves name, interpret and give meaning to what is happening. This means paying attention to forms of knowledge and judgement that can easily be overlooked by conventional approaches to risk: relationships, obligations, memories, values, emotions, cultural practices and ideas about what is right or worthwhile.
One of the concepts emerging from this work is that of moral grammars. These are the principles, values and forms of ethical action through which people organise what matters and make judgements when circumstances become difficult. They are not universal rules waiting to be discovered. They are rooted in particular histories, relationships and ways of living together.
This also raises a question about research itself. Who has the authority to say that something is coming to an end? Who gets to describe what is being lost? And whose understanding of what matters is allowed to shape the response? PREFER therefore experiments with forms of collaboration involving local artists, filmmakers and storytellers, seeking not simply to document people's experiences but to create spaces in which they can speak and represent them on their own terms.
PREFER does not aim to produce a universal theory of existential risk, or to predict which communities or ways of life will disappear. Instead, it asks what we can learn by taking seriously the judgements of people who are already living through situations in which the future has become uncertain.
At its heart, PREFER is about what people do when something they deeply value is at risk of no longer being - and what this can teach us about risk, values, responsibility and the possibilities of collective action.

PREFER (Local Terminal Risk as a Proxy for Existential Risk) is funded by the European Research Council through an ERC Advanced Grant awarded under the ERC-2021-ADG call (Grant Agreement No. 101055305). The project is hosted by Université de Versailles Saint Quentin en Yveleines (part of the Paris Saclay collective) and conducted within the CEARC research centre.

LPI, professor Jean-Paul Vanderlinden

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-21T07:52:00Z

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden is Professor of Ecological Economics and Environmental Studies at Université side Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, where he is a member of CEARC (Centre d'études et de recherche sur les risques et les vulnérabilités). His work sits at the intersection of ecological economics, environmental social science and the study of how people make sense of, and respond to, profound environmental and social change. ([https://jean-paul.reflexivescience.org)
Photo
His research is concerned with situations in which the futures people take for granted are radically unsettled. Rather than approaching such situations only through externally defined risks or vulnerabilities, he is interested in how people themselves identify what is at stake, what they consider worth preserving, and how they mobilise values, principles and forms of ethical reasoning in response.
Photo
Jean-Paul Vanderlinden has a long-standing interest in epistemic diversity and in developing forms of research that take seriously the knowledge, experience and agency of people directly concerned by environmental change. His work combines conceptual development with empirical research and experimentation with narrative and artistic forms of knowledge production and restitution.
Photo
Through PREFER, he seeks to extend the discourse on existential risks, while contributing to a broader understanding of how societies can confront profound uncertainty without reducing the question to technical assessments of risk alone.
Jean-Paul's personal page lay be found here: https://jean-paul.reflexivescience.org

Post doctoral scientist: doctor Clara de La Hoz Del Real

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-20T09:24:00Z

Clara De La Hoz Del Real is a sociologist and researcher at CEARC, Université de Versailles Saint-Qentin-en-Yvelines, whose work explores how people and communities make sense of profound social and environmental change. Her research focuses particularly on questions of power, inequality, identity and the ways in which dominant representations shape how situations of crisis and uncertainty are understood and addressed.

Within PREFER, Clara contributes to the project's investigation of local terminal risks and the moral and social processes through which people confronted with major disruptions interpret what is happening to them, what matters, and what futures remain possible. Her priority field country is Colombia, and her main field site is the rural municipality of San Miguel de Sema, where she explores these questions through sustained engagement with local experiences, narratives and ways of understanding change.

Her research draws on qualitative and ethnographic approaches, with particular attention to narratives, lived experience and processes of identification. This work has led her to investigate environmental disasters and their aftermath, including research with communities affected by the 2010–2011 floods in Colombia. Her doctoral research examined the social consequences of temporary displacement and the ways in which affected populations negotiate identity, dignity and social relations in the aftermath of disaster.

Clara has also developed a sustained research relationship with Colombia and Latin America, including through her collaboration with the Instituto Pensar at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. Her work combines empirical research with a broader interest in the politics of knowledge: who has the authority to describe a situation, whose experience becomes visible, and how alternative accounts can challenge dominant ways of understanding social and environmental change.

Through PREFER, she brings these questions to the study of terminal situations, contributing to an approach that takes seriously people's own interpretations of what is at stake in uncertain and potentially transformative circumstances.

September 2026 blog post: "LIGHT" taking the next step towards locally defined habitability

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-19T10:04:42Z

After several months of development and discussion with potential partners, we have submitted LIGHT - Local terminal risks, Inhabitable futures and Governance of sustained Habitability Transitions - to the ERC Proof of Concept programme.

LIGHT grows directly out of the questions and material developed through PREFER, but takes them in a somewhat different direction. PREFER has explored how people living through situations they experience as potentially terminal understand what is at stake, what matters to them, and what they consider worth preserving. LIGHT asks what might happen if these insights were put to work: could we develop ways of supporting habitability transitions that start from the knowledge and values of the people concerned, rather than from an external definition of what makes a place habitable or uninhabitable?

This matters because habitability is too often treated as an essentially environmental question. A place becomes “uninhabitable” because of heat, flooding, drought, pollution or other forms of environmental disruption. These are obviously important. But people can also experience a place as becoming uninhabitable because of social, political or economic transformations - or because ways of living, relationships, attachments and meanings that make life worth living are being disrupted.

LIGHT therefore starts from a simple shift: rather than asking first whether a place is habitable, ask how those who live there understand what makes it so.

The project would develop and test a practical approach for doing this, combining narrative enquiry, action research and co-production with local partners. The ambition is not to produce another universal definition of habitability, but to explore whether locally grounded understandings can become useful in decision-making and in the governance of transitions.

This has been a genuinely collaborative development process. Since June, we have been discussing the idea, its possible applications and its practical feasibility with a number of potential partners working in very different contexts. These conversations have been important in shaping the proposal and, more importantly, in testing whether LIGHT could become something useful beyond the academic world.

LIGHT is therefore not yet a project. We have submitted the proposal, and the work described above will begin if the project is funded. For now, what exists is an idea that has been developed, challenged and refined through several months of conversations with prospective partners. Now comes the external look and evaluation: peer review, for funding and for publication. This is what makes academia - and academics - grow!

Post doctoral scientist: doctor Baptiste SALMON

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-19T09:27:00Z

Baptiste Salmon is a social scientist working on climate change, territorial adaptation and the existential dimensions of environmental change. He completed his PhD at Université Paris-Saclay in 2025, within CEARC, under the supervision of Yorghos Remvikos and Charlotte da Cunha. His research was conducted in partnership with BL évolution, a consultancy cooperative specialising in ecological transition.

His doctoral research examined how place-attached communities experience profound environmental and social upheavals, and how climate change can become entangled with threats to the continuity of places and ways of life. He worked comparatively with three communities: Greenville, California, rebuilding after the 2021 Dixie Fire; Métabief, France, where the future of a ski-based economy is challenged by declining snow cover; and Fairbourne, Wales, where sea-level rise has led to proposals for the future decommissioning of the village.

Baptiste's work focuses on loss - both material and immaterial - place attachment, sense-making and epistemic justice. He uses qualitative approaches including interviews, narrative analysis and life stories to understand how inhabitants interpret changes affecting the places they call home. His research also examines how top-down adaptation policies can interact with local understandings of place, sometimes creating forms of distrust or loss.

Baptiste has been a member of the PREFER project, where his research contributes to the project's investigation of local terminal risks and their relationship to broader questions of existential risk. His work brings particular attention to the territorial and experiential dimensions of situations in which communities face the possible loss or radical transformation of the places and futures to which they are attached.

Senior scientist: Associate prof. Charlotte Da Cunha

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-18T16:49:00Z

Charlotte Da Cunha is Associate Professor in Land Use Planning at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and Director of CEARC. Her research focuses on adaptation to climate change and on how territories can navigate profound and sometimes irreversible change. A central concern of her work is justice and equity under changing conditions: how vulnerability is understood, whose interests are taken into account, and how adaptation and transition processes can be made fairer.

Within PREFER, Charlotte contributes her expertise on adaptation planning and on the role of planning when territories face forms of change that challenge established ways of living and organising. Her priority field country is Vietnam, where she works with the project team on communities in the Mekong Delta confronting intertwined environmental, climatic and socio-economic transformations. She is particularly interested in what planning can and cannot do when change becomes extreme, and in how locally grounded knowledge and experience can inform processes of adaptation and transition.

Her research combines qualitative and participatory approaches with prospective methods, the evaluation of adaptation plans and the co-construction of knowledge and governance processes. She has worked extensively on local adaptation planning, including comparisons between French and US cities, and on the role of community engagement and equity in adaptation. Her work has also explored how narratives of change can support community-led foresight and how local initiatives interact with institutional planning.

Charlotte is also interested in bringing different forms of knowledge together, including through experiments at the interface of art and science. In PREFER, this perspective complements the project's ethnographic work by asking how the insights emerging from local experiences of profound change might inform collective deliberation, planning and action.

Some thoughts on the initial selections of study sites

Jean-Paul Vanderlinden — 2026-09-18T08:01:25Z

While our results did lead to a change of framing, this is the way we started community identification and selection.

The high level of uncertainty associated with the breakthrough nature of PREFER led the team to focus on communities with whom we have well established relationships based on trust and mutual respect. During this preparatory work, we assessed the salience of local terminal risk situations through dialogue. Starting with an initial sample of 18 local communities, we selected communities facing the combined pressure of ecosystem collapse due to externally driven changes and economic upheavals driven by external political forces. we chose communities operating in a diversity of contexts. PREFER case studies include communities that are currently economically dependent and communities that are not. The communities were also selected, and paired according to the nature of the terminality as identified by community members: dominance of environmental upheavals, dominance of sociopolitical drivers, and cultural erosion as a central source of concerns. This sampling aims at facilitating comparison, while fostering diversity of situations. This led to the identification of three distinct geographic and cultural areas: the Circumpolar Arctic, areas under various social and economic pressures, Colombia, and the Mekong Delta. 6 communities have been selected initially, through fieldwork we have now 8 in total, at least two for each dominant source of concerns, and thus paired these across geographic area.

The Circumpolar Arctic is facing accelerated environmental changes due to climate change that is amplified by the specific nature of the Arctic environment: dependency on sea ice, reliance on permafrost, for example. In Greenland, services to remote communities are being eroded in an effort, among other things, to concentrate the population in the country's capital. Suffice to say that in each of these communities we heard statements expressing grave concerns regarding their future.

Colombia has long been considered one of the most “risky” countries in the world. First, several elements converge to make Colombia one of the most disaster-prone countries globally (Baena, 2011). Secondly, the country faces many anthropogenic threats, including high population growth and rapid and disorderly urbanization, corruption, high levels of poverty, inequality and marginalization of the country's population. This panorama is exacerbated in particular by the effects of the armed conflict, which forced around 8 millions of people to displace to areas at risk.

Similarly, it is widely acknowledged that the Mekong Delta is under terminal threat from the combination of subsidence induced by human activities, sea level rise, modified hydrology, climate change and broader economic forces. Yet, and quite uniquely, the Mekong Delta is not currently supported by transfer payments or regional development policies. This contrasts with Greenland the circumpolar Arctic and Colombia where communities are actively supported.