Migration is widely recognized as an adaptation strategy to environmental risks (Boas et al., 2025), and environmental shocks often increase migration aspirations (Freihardt, 2025). According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) (2025), extreme weather events and disasters triggered an unprecedented 45.8 million internal displacements worldwide in 2024, nearly double the annual average of the past decade, with storms and floods accounting for the majority of these movements across multiple continents. While environmental factors significantly shape such mobility patterns, they intersect with social structures—including gender—to determine who moves and who remains (Hoffmann et al., 2019). In Bangladesh, seasonal climate disasters affect roughly 32% of coastal communities, and 64% of households in floodplain areas experienced at least one displacement due to river erosion, with an average of seven displacements per household (Seddiky et al., 2024; Khan et al., 2021). Displacement events often reproduce gendered vulnerabilities, as women disproportionately shoulder caregiving responsibilities and face mobility constraints (Furlong et al., 2022). Thus, one key understudied dimension of the relationship between environmental risk and staying in place (hereafter non-migration) is gender.

Again, knowledge about how people respond to livelihood threats—whether to migrate or stay—within a particular environment is often passed down through generations (Mallick and Hunter, 2024). Likewise, attitudes towards gender roles and how gender is constructed in the family and in society more broadly are also intergenerational and deeply entrenched in societies and cultures. At the same time, the gendered dimensions of environmental migration are beginning to be explored, but much less is known about those of non-migration (Hunter and David, 2009). Thus, a significant knowledge gap remains regarding how women’s non-migration decisions evolve across generations in the face of environmental risk and how those decisions are rooted in intergenerational gender norms.

Actually, intergenerational gendered outcomes, including patterns of non-migration, are deeply embedded within patriarchal social structures that shape norms, expectations, and entitlements across generations (Mallick and van den Berg 2025). In such contexts, women (daughters) are often socialized into traditional domestic and caregiving roles that are socially legitimized but simultaneously constrain access to socially prestigious positions and long-term economic mobility (Farré and Vella, 2013). Moreover, when mothers engage in counter-stereotypical roles, such as paid employment, daughters may experience negative social evaluations that further limit their opportunities within gender-stratified local hierarchies (Bridges et al., 2002; De La Rica and Román, 2016). Under conditions of climate change and disaster risk, these gendered norms are not only reproduced but amplified. Women and girls disproportionately shoulder intergenerational care responsibilities, particularly for children and older family members, which can delay access to early warning systems, evacuation, and safe shelters during climate-related hazards (Furlong et al., 2022). These socially embedded obligations increase women’s exposure to risk and constrain their mobility options, whether to stay or migrate.

A mounting body of literature finds complex, context-dependent relationships between non-migration and environmental risk (Pemberton et al., 2021; Furlong et al., 2022). It examines how households may use non-migration as an adaptive strategy for livelihoods under environmental stress. Assessing non-migration is more than just the opposite of evaluating migration (IOM, 2017). Instead, it is crucial to collect information on the aspirations and capabilities of both migrants and non-migrants to determine whether the decision to remain non-migrant was forced or voluntary. Non-migrants in risky locales who can migrate but elect not to are voluntary non-migrants, while those who desire to migrate but cannot (due to lack of resources, self-efficacy, access to information, etc.) may be considered forced or involuntary non-migrants (Mallick and Schanze, 2020). This classification, however, is complex and not simply based on whether one has the resources to move. Some residents who lack the capabilities to migrate may choose to stay voluntarily, especially if they have the capacity to adapt in place. Still, it is important to note that the logical distinction between voluntary and involuntary non-migrants is critical to understanding agency’s role in environmental non-migration and its gender inclusiveness. Consequently, gendered non-migration in climate-vulnerable contexts cannot be adequately explained through individual choice or economic reasoning alone. Instead, it emerges from the intersection of intergenerational gender norms, care responsibilities, and structural inequalities. As mentioned, the gendered nature of environmental migration has begun to be explored in the literature, but equal attention should be given to why and how non-migration is gendered. This highlights the need for a more holistic analytical framework that integrates gender, intergenerational relations, and climate vulnerability to inform inclusive and equitable climate adaptation and migration policies. The framework should address the question: How do gendered societal customs, religious practices, and beliefs, as well as intergenerational transfers and transformations of gendered expectations, influence women’s non-migration in the face of environmental stress?

Existing gendered frameworks in climate change research, including feminist political ecology (Rocheleau et al., 2013; Elmhirst, 2015), gender and development (Rathgeber, 2003; Kataeva et al., 2024), intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2013; Bonu Rosenkranz, 2024), and social vulnerability approaches (Drakes, and Tate, 2022), have been central to explaining differentiated climate impacts across social groups. These frameworks highlight how gendered divisions of labor, unequal access to resources, power asymmetries, and institutional exclusions shape vulnerability, adaptation capacity, and resilience. Intersectional analyses further demonstrate how gender interacts with class, age, ethnicity, and location to produce uneven climate outcomes (Bonu Rosenkranz, 2024). Despite these advances, much of this literature treats gender as temporally static and primarily focuses on intra-generational inequalities, often neglecting how gender norms, roles, and responsibilities are reproduced, contested, or transformed across generations. However, an intergenerational, gendered framework is essential to understanding climate vulnerability as a dynamic process shaped by the transmission of care obligations, mobility constraints, and adaptive capacities within families and communities. Such a perspective moves beyond immediate exposure to climate risk and enables more inclusive climate and migration policies that address the long-term social reproduction of gendered vulnerability.

Keeping the above-mentioned lacuna of intergenerational gendered influence on non-migration in the face of climate change, this position paper proposes a conceptual framework, titled Intergenerational Gendered Environmental Non-Migration (IGEN), that places non-migration at the center of the analysis and applies an intergenerational lens to understand gendered aspirations and capabilities to execute mobility decisions in the climate-vulnerable patriarchal landscape. This IGEN framework helps identify and elucidate (1) the historical dimensions of environmental risk related to women’s non-migration and (2) the role of intergenerational experience and knowledge of women non-migrants in climate adaptation. The IGEN framework is designed to serve as an instrumental tool for connecting the historical dimensions of environmental risks to non-migration decision-making among women living in a climate-vulnerable context. While outlining the historical dimension, entrenched intergenerational experiences and knowledge, gendered histories, familial expectations, and local acquaintance, the framework advances a deeper understanding of women’s mobility decisions. Hence, the framework sheds light on a rarely discussed issue of gendered immobility rooted in complex social, cultural, and historical processes within climate-affected communities. Increased knowledge about such intergenerational dynamics and interlinkages between environmental non-migration and gender will support locally driven adaptation strategies and action plans.

The following sections advance the IGEN framework by tracing how gendered non-migration emerges under environmental risk. “Gendered ideology of the society at environmental risk” examines gendered social ideologies shaping exposure and adaptation expectations, followed by “Intergenerational transmissions of gendered ideology and knowledge,” which applies an intergenerational lens to show how norms around care and mobility are transmitted across generations. “Agency, gender, and mobility decisions in the context of environmental stress” analyzes how these constraints shape agency and mobility decisions under environmental stress. “Edifying intergenerational gendered environmental non-migration (IGEN) framework” synthesizes these insights into the IGEN framework, while “Outlook” discusses implications for future research and inclusive climate and migration policy.