MIGRATION AND ECOLOGICAL APATHY: HOW MEN’S LABOUR OUT-MIGRATION SHAPES ENVIRONMENTAL CARE

Abstract

Uzbekistan combines large-scale male labour out-migration with an ambitious national “green” agenda. This paper conceptualises how the absence of working-age men reshapes environmental care in source communities. Drawing on the New Economics of Labour Migration, value–belief–norm theory, place-attachment theory and gender-and-environment scholarship, it identifies five mechanisms—stewardship-labour deficit, remittance-mediated detachment, re-feminisation of environmental labour with constrained authority, eroded place attachment, and interrupted intergenerational transmission. The paper argues that the resulting “ecological apathy” is better understood as a conditional redistribution of care than as a uniform decline of environmental values, and it proposes an ethnographic research design for the Kashkadarya region.