From risk reduction to a landscape of (un)desired outcomes: Climate migrants’ perceptions of migration success and failure

Much of the climate migration research examines whether migration is a successful/adaptive response that reduces climate risk or a failed/maladaptive response that increases risk. However, it has largely failed to examine migration outcomes through migrants’ own eyes, thereby yielding insights that are potentially disconnected from their realities and aspirations. To address this gap, we examine how migrants perceive “success” and “failure” concerning drought-influenced migration. Focusing on migration from agro-pastoral northern Kenya to the City of Nairobi, we conduct semi-structured interviews with 36 migrants who fulfill two criteria: (1) their migration was induced mainly by drought impacts, and (2) they had spent at least one year in Nairobi. We then apply a thematic analysis to identify the main success and failure perceptions. We find that migrants’ success perceptions focus on the support of their households in their places of origin. A similar failure theme pertains to migrants’ inability to achieve this objective. However, another predominant theme emphasizes failure as cultural assimilation in Nairobi, often linked with substance abuse and perceived as a trigger for cascading failures, including migrants’ inability to achieve their adaptation-related objectives. We also show how migrants’ perceptions reveal their preferences for specific adaptations, including seemingly maladaptive ones, and the role of social factors in determining migration’s overall success and/or failure. Accordingly, we argue that research must shift from framing migration narrowly as a climate risk reduction strategy, to conceptualizing it as a process of navigating a landscape of desired and undesired outcomes.


Introduction
Despite important theoretical and empirical developments over the past two decades, climate migration research has largely neglected to consider what constitutes success or failure in the eyes of those who migrate, focusing instead on a heavily criticized epistemological framing of migration outcomes based on their positive or negative effects on climate risk (Bettini, 2017;Mallick & Schanze, 2020;Singh & Basu, 2020). This constitutes a major lacuna because people's perceptions shape their understanding of climate impacts, the decision-making processes that underlie migration as a response to those impacts, and the degree to which specific migration and adaptation outcomes are viewed as desirable or undesirable (Few et al., 2021;Vinke et al., 2022). Adopting a narrow climate risk framing may thus lead to erroneous insights and interventions, and is therefore problematic from a policy perspective as well as a theoretical-analytical perspective. To overcome these problems, scholars are increasingly arguing for a "people-centered" approach that explicates how individuals perceive migration's objectives and potential outcomes Borderon et al., 2021;Klepp, 2018;Oakes, 2019;Parsons & Østergaard Nielsen, 2021). Examining such perceptions is therefore recognized as a central research priority (Arnall, 2021;Parsons & Østergaard Nielsen, 2021). In this study, we seek to contribute to the current developments in the climate migration literature by asking-how do climate migrants perceive the success and failure of their migration?
To examine the research question, this study focuses on drought-influenced migration from agro-pastoral northern Kenya to the City of Nairobi. Lessons derived from the Kenyan case are important, not least because it features the general attributes of climate-related migration. As many studies suggest, societies that depend directly on the environment for their livelihoods are some of the most prone to climate migration (e.g., Barnett & Adger, 2018;Call & Gray, 2020). The projected intensification of drought due to climate change, especially prominent in arid and semiarid regions (Seneviratne et al., 2021), is of particular concern as such events threaten water security and livelihood sources such as agriculture and pastoralism (Kaczan & Orgill-Meyer, 2020;Wiederkehr et al., 2018). Research conducted in academia and by international organizations suggests that such impacts will increase migration flows, especially internal rural-to-urban migration (Kaczan & Orgill-Meyer, 2020;Rigaud et al., 2018). As climate stress intensifies it is expected that such migration, often undertaken by young adults rather than by entire households (Anderson & Silva, 2020;Koubi et al., 2021), will increasingly become long term (de Sherbinin et al., 2012;Rigaud et al., 2018). From a local-regional perspective, East Africa has long been a hotspot of recurring droughts and consequent migrations (Rigaud et al., 2018). As policies aiming to improve the adaptive outcomes of migration in this region are incipient (Rigaud et al., 2021), the time is ripe to enrich these plans with people's perspectives of migration's success and failure (IOM, 2017).

Migration as (successful/mal)adaptation
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes migration as "a universal strategy that individuals and households adopt to improve well-being and livelihoods in response to economic uncertainty, political instability and environmental change" (Cissé et al., 2022(Cissé et al., p. 1080. This description reflects the implicit definition of 'success' prevalent in the migration-as-adaptation literature, being one that results in movement away from risk. The most predominant theme within this discourse views migration as a wage-seeking behavior, considered adaptive when followed by remittance sending, a perspective originating in the "New Economics of Labor Migration" literature (de Haas, 2010;Stark & Bloom, 1985). Accordingly, most studies that focus on success frame migration as a livelihood adaptation and highlight its contribution to households' income diversification (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2019;Kluger et al., 2020;Maharjan et al., 2021;Tebboth et al., 2019;Wiederkehr et al., 2018). Migration as movement towards risk, such as migrants' settlement in precarious urban environments, is also garnering attention Jacobson et al., 2019). However, our understanding of the migration-adaptation nexus remains limited (Piguet, 2022;Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2018;Tebboth et al., 2019).
One of the fundamental impediments to a better understanding of migration outcomes is the theoretical lens applied to frame and analyze these outcomes. Most importantly, some scholars argue that many studies impose epistemological concepts on research subjects, including the very notion of adaptation, while dedicating limited attention to the social-cultural context in which migration and adaptation occur (Klepp, 2018;Parsons & Østergaard Nielsen, 2021;Vinke et al., 2020). This approach not only fails to capture the breadth of migration's implications for migrant households (Arnall, 2021;Ruiz-de-Oña et al., 2019;Wiegel et al., 2019;Willett & Sears, 2020), but also to elucidate their adaptation preferences and their relationship with households' realities and desirable futures (Ensor et al., 2019;Few et al., 2021;Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2018).

Migration and adaptation through peoples' eyes
Migration-as-adaptation research has yet to comprehensively engage with the concepts of success and failure. However, studies that elucidate migration and adaptation objectives provide valuable insights regarding what individuals perceive as desirable or undesirable outcomes. These studies suggest that alongside climate risk, contextual social-cultural factors matter in two main ways. One, these factors influence the scope of migration's objectives and, by extension, migration's overall success or failure. Research on sub-Saharan pastoral societies illustrates the importance of such factors. For example, McCabe et al. (2014) find that young Maasai warriors migrate to cities to establish independence from their fathers and increase their social-political influence in their communities of origin, both of which are achieved 9 Page 4 of 23 by accumulating wealth as wage laborers. In other instances, migration in itself comprises a rite of passage (Hampshire, 2002;Suso, 2020), or a 'coming of age experience' that constitutes an important objective among rural Kenyans even when migration is heavily influenced by drought (Willett & Sears, 2020). The recognition of multiple migration drivers and related objectives is evident in the evolving terminological shift from 'climate migration' to 'climate-influenced migration' (Bayrak et al., 2022;Borderon et al., 2019;Klepp & Fröhlich, 2020).
Two, within the scope of adaptation objectives, social-cultural factors influence livelihood decisions and the choice of specific actions. Although such decisions are affected by environmental factors (Quandt & Kimathi, 2016;Unks et al., 2019), allowing pastoralists to explain the full range of variables that shape their objectives sheds light on livelihood choices that might seem maladaptive. Culturaloccupational identity constitutes a particularly important factor explaining such choices (Few et al., 2021;Wernersson, 2018). For example, many bachelor Maasai that migrate to cities invest their earnings in cattle, despite their high sensitivity to drought, as cattle are linked with higher social status and are used as dowry payment (McCabe et al., 2014). The same factors, as well as cattle-keeping traditions, have been shown to slow down camel adoption among north Kenyan pastoralists despite camels' greater drought resiliency (Volpato & King, 2019). More broadly, Woodhouse and McCabe (2018) show how Maasai pastoralists interpret the notion of well-being as having 'a good life', a concept that these pastoralists used to explain their livelihood-related aspirations. As these brief examples show, elucidating migrants' success and failure perceptions can pluralize the migration-as-adaptation discourse and enable a more complex and contextualized understanding of migration outcomes.

Definitions of main concepts
This study employs concepts at the intersection of migration, perception, and climate adaptation. We define migration as a permanent or semi-permanent move by a person of at least one year, which involves crossing an administrative border (Brown & Bean, 2005). Thus, we view migration as a long-term process that differs from shorter-term seasonal migration (e.g., Vinke et al., 2022). Climate/environmental migration includes those people who were forced to leave their homes predominantly due to the adverse effects of environmental changes on their livelihoods or living conditions (IOM, 2007).
Perception constitutes judgments, beliefs, and attitudes that construct the meaning individuals ascribe to their reality Taylor et al., 1988). Perceptions are shaped by culture, memories, and experiences, and are "neither universal nor static, but rather a value-laden, dynamic concept" (Slegers, 2008(Slegers, p. 2108. Experiences can be direct or indirect. Indirect experiences include social information, mediated by individuals' values and beliefs (Arnall, 2021;Koubi et al., 2016). Success and failure perceptions are influenced also by individuals' expectations of their ability to achieve certain objectives and by social expectations (Ajzen, 2002;Singh et al., 2018).
The IPCC defines adaptation as "the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities" (Möller et al., 2022(Möller et al., p. 2898. Potential harm is captured by the concept of vulnerability, viewed as "the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected" (Möller et al., 2022(Möller et al., p. 2927. Successful adaptations reduce vulnerability without jeopardizing the capacity for future responses (McDowell & Hess, 2012;Osbahr et al., 2010). Actions that result in opposite effects, that is, "may lead to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes" via "increased or shifted vulnerability to climate change, more inequitable outcomes, or diminished welfare, now or in the future," are maladaptive (Möller et al., 2022(Möller et al., p. 2915. The reference to welfare is indicative of potential negative effects that are indirectly linked with climate risk. However, such effects have received only scant attention in the context of migration Mueller et al., 2020).

Droughts, livelihoods, and culture in northern Kenya
This study focuses on pastoralists and agro-pastoralists who migrated to Nairobi from the northern counties of Marsabit, Isiolo, and Samburu, following the droughts of 2010-2011 and 2016-2017. These counties constitute a long-standing source of internal migration in Kenya and were severely affected by these droughts (NDMA, 2017;UNOCHA, 2011). Rainfall in these sparsely populated counties, shown in Fig. 1, ranges between 150 and 550 mm/year and is concentrated in two seasons-the October-November 'short rains' and the March-May 'long rains' (Government of Kenya, 2012;Nicholson, 2017). In this largely arid and droughtprone environment, livelihoods are predominantly pastoral, entailing extensive production of cattle supplemented by goats, sheep, and camels. Agro-pastoralism is also common, mainly in the relatively humid southern areas of northern Kenya (Government of Kenya, 2012).
For the ethnic minorities residing in the economically and politically marginalized north, such as the Samburus, Rendilles, and Boranas, pastoralism is both a social and economic activity that is deeply rooted in their culture and way of life (Ng'ang'a et al., 2020). Cattle, in particular, are traditionally viewed as a source of social status, wealth, and well-being (Few et al., 2021). The use of cattle as dowry payment is linked with important identity components such as masculinity, and its herding is entrusted in the hands of esteemed herders-warriors (Volpato & King, 2019). To many of the pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in the north religion is a rather fluid construct, and Islam and various forms of Christianity coexist alongside, and are interwoven with, local indigenous beliefs (Watson & Kochore, 2012). Educational attainment among pastoralists is generally limited and often does not span more than several years (Ng'ang'a et al., 2016). More broadly, northern traditions and cultural identity, as well as the languages spoken by the northern tribes, are distinct from those of the considerably larger and politically influential Kenyan ethnic groups, such as the Kikuyu and Luo, which make up the majority of Nairobi's population (Fouts et al., 2021). Due to these differences, some northern pastoralists do not self-identify as Kenyan (Schrepfer & Caterina, 2014 The droughts in 2010-2011 and 2016-2017 constitute two of the worst droughts that afflicted northern Kenya since the turn of the century (Uhe et al., 2018). Both events led to severe water insecurity and widespread livestock mortality, thereby undermining livelihoods across this region. These impacts have, in turn, placed 3.7 million and 2.7 million people in need of assistance in 2011 and 2017, respectively (UNOCHA, 2011(UNOCHA, , 2017. In both droughts, impacts on livelihoods were entangled with social factors such as cattle rustling and conflicts over grazing areas (Sheekh  . These pervasive problems, which often restrict access to resources and undermine pastoral livelihoods, tend to increase during or following droughts and exacerbate their effects (Schilling et al., 2014). Often, migration driven by drought and other climatic events, whether influenced by social factors as in northern Kenya or not, is less voluntary than more standard labor migration and usually results in lower returns (Cissé et al., 2022). This lower degree of agency in migration decisions often impinges on the ability of migrants to improve their households' well-being and reduce their vulnerability (McLeman et al., 2021), although over time material returns from migration can increase as migrants become established in destination areas (Svabooza et al., 2022).
Many of those who migrated due to the 2010-2011 and 2016-2017 droughts moved to Nairobi in search of alternative income sources. Often, north Kenyan pastoralists migrate to Nairobi for periods exceeding 1 year. Most of these migrants, nearly all of whom are men, are employed as security guards, while others work as drivers, private teachers, or in the cultural tourism sector (Ng'ang'a et al., 2016). Those working in security usually guard private properties in well-off neighborhoods such as Karen and Karen End, and often live on these properties in separate quarters provided by their employers. The method applied to examine how northern migrants perceive the success and failure of drought-influenced migration is presented in the next section.

Research method
To answer our research question, we focus on migrants who fulfill two main criteria: (1) their migration was induced mainly by the impacts of the 2010-2011 drought or the 2016-2017 drought, and (2) they had spent at least one year in Nairobi at the time of data collection. The purpose of the first criterion is to guarantee that we examine perceptions that are firmly linked with drought rather than those that are linked with more general rural-to-urban migration. The second criterion ensures that we focus on migration as a permanent or semi-permanent move. Both of these criteria are in line with our view of climate migration, outlined in the 'Definitions of main concepts' section. We apply the second criterion also because of the potential lag between the onset of drought and migrants' arrival in Nairobi. Droughts unfold progressively and thus often result in migration only after adaptation options are exhausted and the economic decline induced by the drought has reached a certain threshold, a process that may take up to several years (Nawrotzki et al., 2017). Similarly, some migrants may seek employment in county towns before moving to Nairobi (Ng'ang'a et al., 2016). Thus, this criterion allows the inclusion of such migrants in the analysis while guaranteeing that Nairobi-specific migration outcomes and related perceptions have had sufficient time to materialize.
Participants were recruited with the assistance of a local contact person-a university graduate who conducted research on migration-related issues in the past and knew many of the interviewees. Additionally, we applied a snowball sampling strategy and asked the participants to connect us with other migrants they know. In total, 36 migrants were interviewed by the second author in January-April 9 Page 8 of 23 2019, out of which 29 migrated due to the 2010-2011 drought and seven due to the 2016-2017 drought. The number of interviewees was determined based on the principle of saturation in qualitative research, implying that new data was repeating the data collected in previous interviews and thus was not adding new information relating to the research question (Constantinou et al., 2017;Saunders et al., 2018). As migration from northern Kenya is undertaken almost exclusively by men (Ng'ang'a et al., 2016), only male migrants were interviewed. Table 1 summarizes their main attributes.
To elucidate their perceptions of success and failure, migrants were asked the following question(s): "What is considered for you and for people like you, who come from the north to Nairobi, as success(failure) when you think of migration as a way to respond to the impacts of drought? Why?" We opted for open-ended questions that, while referring explicitly to migration as a response to drought impacts (in line with our focus on climate-influenced migration and related selection criteria), provide ample space for migrants to express their perceptions and explain them using their own words. Beyond the questions concerning migrants' perceptions of success and failure, interviewees were asked about the effects of drought on their families and livelihoods in northern Kenya, the importance of drought as a migration driver, and various aspects of their lives in Nairobi. The interviews were translated by the contact person, who served also as an interpreter, to/from English from/to KiSwahili, Samburu, and Rendille languages. Each interview was recorded, subject to informed consent, and later transcribed. Interviewees were assigned pseudonyms, used also to present the results, to protect their anonymity. All of the interviews took place in migrants' workplaces or public spaces.
We apply a thematic analysis to explicate migrants' success and failure perceptions. Thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns within qualitative data (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Each theme represents a specific meaning within the dataset. We opt for an inductive, semantic, and essentialist analysis. Inductive analysis is mainly data-driven and does not attempt to fit the data into a predetermined theoretical framework (Patton, 1990). Migrants' perceptions are identified semantically, based on the explicit meaning of the text, without attempting to interpret it or uncover latent connotations. This, in turn, allows us to report migrants' perceptions in an essentialist manner that reflects their reality (Clinton et al., 2020). To limit cultural biases that might affect the identification of themes and the theorization of their meaning, migrants were asked to explain their perceptions of success and failure. The analysis followed the five main phases outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006). In the first phase, we read the texts describing the perceptions while searching for meanings and patterns. Then, we generated initial codes and systematically coded the data. Codes constitute the basic segment of raw data concerning the studied phenomenon. In phase three, we sorted the list of codes into candidate themes and sub-themes. Phase four included the refinement of the themes based on Patton's (1990) dual criteria for the validity of categories-internal homogeneity (coherence of codes within themes) and external heterogeneity (distinct differences between themes). In the final phase, the identified themes and sub-themes were defined and named.
The prevalence of each theme and sub-theme was computed at the data item level, per description of perceived success/failure. That is, the prevalence was calculated as the number of migrants who mentioned at least one code pertaining to each theme/sub-theme. Extracts that capture the essence of the identified themes and subthemes were noted down. Finally, although success/failure perceptions might change as a function of the time spent in Nairobi, we could not compare the 2010-11 drought migrants to the 2016-17 drought migrants as the latter group included only seven migrants, thereby making a robust inference impossible.

Drought impacts and migration to Nairobi
All 36 migrants reported complete or near-complete destruction of their livelihoods due to the 2010-2011 and 2016-2017 droughts. Loss of livestock constituted the worst effect, impinging on households' ability to produce sufficient amounts of dairy and meat for self-consumption. Agro-pastoralists' agricultural production also declined as crops in their shambas (small agricultural plots) failed. Concurrently, selling livestock became increasingly difficult, as other herders suffered similar impacts and were unable to keep additional animals. This, in turn, reduced households' ability to purchase food, a problem that was exacerbated by the increase in grain prices caused by the droughts. Many households were unable to afford also other necessities, such as clothing for children and medication for the remaining livestock.
Many migrants also mentioned the interaction between the droughts' impacts and other migration drivers, including tribal conflicts, lack of available jobs in the north, and Nairobi's reputation as a place where money can be made easily. Kenya's compulsory education law constituted an additional important factor, as the drought-induced economic effects implied that many families struggled to pay their children's school fees. These stressors exacerbated the impacts caused by the droughts, which undermined the interviewees' ability to provide even their families and their own most basic needs, thereby forcing them to migrate. Jospert, a 31-year-old security guard who left the north due to the 2010-2011 drought to provide for his wife and three children, explained how the drought affected his decision to migrate: "The drought brought poverty to my family. During the drought there was no food and no water. I was struggling to find water for my cattle and after they all died I decided to come to Nairobi." Another migrant, 21-year-old Liyoko, arrived in Nairobi in 2016. He is unmarried and works in construction to support his siblings and parents. He explained how the drought led him to migrate in search of a job and the main advantage of this job over pastoralism: "I decided to migrate when I saw that all my livestock was dying, the main thing I was relying on. Then I decided to move because a job cannot die."

Perceptions of successful migration
The analysis of success perceptions resulted in two themes, shown in Fig. 2. The considerably more predominant theme comprises three sub-themes pertaining to the support of households in places of origin, linked with the use of remittances. A secondary theme, titled 'self-success', comprises two sub-themes consisting of objectives that concern only the migrants themselves. Fig. 2 Migrants' success perceptions. Themes are shown in dark gray, sub-themes in light gray. Prevalence was calculated as the number of migrants who mentioned at least one code pertaining to each theme/sub-theme

Success as supporting households in places of origin
Nearly all of the migrants mentioned the fulfillment of their families' basic needs as a key success component, highlighting the importance of this objective as the minimum expected net return to migration. The most common perception within this sub-theme, often described as an adaptive response to drought impacts, focused on migrants' ability to provide necessities such as food and clothing. Moses, who sends much of the money he earns as a security guard to his wife and six children, explained this succinctly, reflecting on his achievement: "[success is when] you are able to lessen the problem that brought you to Nairobi-the issue of drought, the issue of your family sleeping without food. I came to Nairobi and now they are able to eat." The second largest sub-theme relates to migrants' ability to educate their children. Many migrants stressed the importance of this objective, often emphasizing its contribution to adaptation by relating to their lack of education and consequent inability to obtain high-paying jobs, the sensitivity of pastoral livelihoods to drought, and the employment opportunities that education can open up, as they have witnessed in Nairobi. Daniel, a 29-year-old migrant who works as a security guard and supports his wife and five children, explained how these factors shaped the importance he sees in supporting his children's education: "I have seen the life of taking care of animals. During the drought I saw the life of people who are educated-they are not affected by it. They have work, they get money. But during the drought, if you still depend on livestock, all the animals die and my children will be poor. That is why it is very important for me to send my children to school. I realized that taking care of animals has no importance." Migrants' perception of success as livelihood reconstruction and diversification, mentioned by slightly over two-thirds of the interviewees, constitutes the third sub-theme pertaining to the support of households in places of origin. Bearing direct implications to households' vulnerability and adaptive capacity, this sub-theme demonstrates migrants' view of success as target earners who send remittances to fortify their households' income sources. Two main success perceptions comprise this sub-theme. The first perception focuses on reconstructing livestock. Many migrants view livestock as essential to their families' survival, linking it with the ability to avoid hunger or the use of credit for purchasing food. Contrary to the perception of education and the importance of non-pastoral employment to adaptation expressed by some migrants, such perceptions prioritize livestock as a 'complete' source of livelihood relative to wage labor as a source of income. Bosko, a 46-year-old security guard who supports his wife and two children, referred to the sources of stability and instability linked with urban employment and livestock ownership. He argued that success implies the latter, as livestock provides greater certainty despite its sensitivity to drought and always remains with its owners, while a job can end at any moment: 9 Page 12 of 23 "The job here in Nairobi is stable because I know that at the end of the month I get some money. But the only thing that I and the next generations to come can really be sure of is our livestock. The job here in Nairobi can be over every minute if I get fired but my livestock will always be there. For us, it doesn't matter if there is drought or not-we live. So back at home it is much better. Our livestock is the only thing we are sure of, whether it is dead or alive." The other perception of success as livelihood reconstruction and diversification pertains to the development of new livelihood sources in northern Kenya-a goal most migrants did not achieve due to the associated costs. Most of the migrants who perceived this as success talked about their aspirations to open small family-owned shops, reflecting households' intentions to diversify risks by developing livelihoods that require income generation conditions that are weakly correlated with agro-pastoralist production. Some migrants explicitly described such shops as an effective adaptation to the impacts induced by drought and the consequent hardship. As Saidi, a 22-yearold unmarried migrant who supports his mother and siblings by working as a security guard, explained: "Successful migration is when you can measure what a person has done back at home. Maybe people who have stayed in Nairobi for five, six, seven years. If you go back home you say this person has opened a business, back at home, then that is a successful migration… The reason why that person who built his shop is a successful man, is because this person has gone to Nairobi with a problem. When in Nairobi, he got a job and came with a solution-a solution to the problems he had before. His family does not need to suffer now, and is able to live a good life." Throughout the interviews, success perceptions were mentioned in tandem with broader notions pertaining to migrants' ability to support their families. These notions were expressed as "improving the lives of their families"/ "the lives that the migrants had before (the drought)," "reducing the problems at home"/ "solving the problems that brought them to Nairobi," and "living a good life." Many migrants mentioned that success is measured by what the person has done back home, especially reconstructing and/or diversifying livelihoods, stressing their intention to return to northern Kenya once they achieve these objectives. Thus, a critical component of success as defined by the migrants is being on the right path to achieve the livelihood fortification that will enable them to return to the north. Similarly, nearly all of the 2010-2011 drought migrants, who experienced the 2016-2017 drought when they were already working in Nairobi, indicated that their families suffered less in the latter drought thanks to the remittances they sent, despite the death of livestock in the drought. When asked to predict their actions during the next drought, many replied that they do not plan for the future. Others replied that this matter is in the hands of god, illustrating the effect of religion on their perception of uncertainty.

Self-success
The second theme identified in the analysis comprises self-centered objectives. It includes two sub-themes, one of which relates to the preservation of cultural identity. This preservation includes the remembrance of northern culture and an adequate representation of this culture in Nairobi. As David, a married 31-yearold security guard with three children, explained about his success while relating to the potential failure ever-present in Nairobi: "You get a job, but you don't indulge yourself into all the celebrations in Nairobi… If you forget your way, you forget your people, you forget your responsibilities, then that becomes one of the greatest failures of coming to Nairobi." The second sub-theme, concerning personal development, encompasses perceptions such as educating oneself and saving dowry money. Thirty-two-year-old Gabriel, who works as a security guard and provides for his wife and two children, explained that acquiring even just basic education constitutes a success: "Someone who came to Nairobi when he was illiterate, and was able to educate himself here in Nairobi, that's a successful migration." A third objective in this sub-theme is to become a role model in the community of origin. This objective reflects the importance of social status accumulation as a migration driver. Joseph, a 30-year-old cultural dancer who supports his siblings and parents, explained his aspiration to achieve this aspect of success: "You say that someone has succeeded, if you see back at home that he has done something. Now, even me, I want to do the same way as he did. Because he succeeded, I just follow his footsteps."

Perceptions of failed migration
Perceptions describing failed migration were categorized into two main themes, shown in Fig. 3. The slightly smaller of the themes pertains to migrants' failure to support their households, in a similar manner to the largely opposite success theme. The larger 'self-failure' theme focuses on the migrants themselves.

Failure as inability to support households in places of origin
The theme pertaining to migrants' failure to support their households includes the same sub-themes identified for success, albeit in a negative context. However, this theme is not the complete opposite of the equivalent success theme. First, it focuses much more heavily on basic needs. Failure to provide these needs was mentioned by all of the migrants who referred to supporting their families. Second, some of the specific perceptions/codes that comprise this theme differ between success and failure. The most pronounced difference concerns friction between migrants and their wives. This perception, relating to migrants' concerns rather than their own experiences, was often expressed in connection with tensions caused by migrants' failure to provide for their families. Lesayan, age 60, is married with seven children and works as a security guard. He explained his concern about this type of failure: "A failure is someone who was divorced by his wife because he came to Nairobi and failed to feed his family, and his wife had to look for another man for feeding the children. Then when you come from Nairobi you go to your home, and you find that the house belongs to the neighbor, because your children are not there."

Self-failure
The second theme identified in the analysis comprises self-centered perceptions. It consists of two sub-themes, both of which describe migrants' abstract perceptions of failure informed by indirect experiences learned from other migrants. The considerably larger sub-theme concerns cultural assimilation in Nairobi, encompassing perceptions that range from succumbing to Nairobi's temptations (substance abuse; relations with women in Nairobi), through emotional and material disconnection from the north (forgetting the problems that led to migration; forgetting the family), to potential outcomes such as loss of cultural identity and decline in social status in the community of origin. The fear of assimilation attests to migrants' view of themselves as alien to the receiving community and their strong connection to their home communities. Some migrants described assimilation as the trigger for a cascading chain of events, which leads to failure Fig. 3 Migrants' failure perceptions. Themes are shown in dark gray, sub-themes in light gray. Prevalence was calculated as the number of migrants who mentioned at least one code pertaining to each theme/subtheme to achieve the adaptive outcome of supporting migrants' families in the sending areas. Peter, a 29-year-old security guard who provides for his wife and five children, explained this cascade: "People who come from back at home, they come to Nairobi and now they see Nairobi like a place of fun, a place of celebration. You start getting yourself into chewing miraa (an addictive endemic plant used as a stimulant), you start drinking, you start walking around with women. Those are failures. And once you start getting yourself in such activities, you forget your family. You have no money that you send to the family…. Until now people that go to Nairobi, they have forgotten him at all, and now they think that person is dead already." Such cascades and the resulting inevitability of total failure were often linked with the triggering effect of substance abuse. John, a 27-year-old married migrant with three children, who works as a security guard, explained this succinctly: "You come to Nairobi. You get a job. And after getting a job, then you start getting yourself into drinking. You can just get to this person, and take him back home." Throughout the interviews, migrants expressed their concern about the threats posed by Nairobi's culture and temptations to northern cultural identity in various ways. These included, for example, fear of being arrested by the police when sleeping in the streets due to substance abuse, adoption of Nairobi hairstyle and dress code, and relations with women from non-northern tribes.
The smaller sub-theme pertaining to self-failure includes moral dimensions. It comprises two main perceptions-becoming a criminal and getting fired. In some cases, migrants perceived moral failure as largely synonymous with one's personality failure. As Metikati, a 43-year-old security guard who supports his wife and three children, explained about getting fired: "Someone may be employed. After getting paid, he forgets about the job. Yeah, he has moved on, and the employer, he met you sleeping and you can lose your job. He met you going for one week after, so you are not coming to get the job. So it is a failure." In other cases, migrants linked moral failure with the Nairobi environment in a manner similar to cultural assimilation and the cascading failures triggered by substance abuse. Isaac, a 25-year-old unmarried security guard who supports his younger siblings and parents, described such a cascade leading to involvement in crime: "Sometimes when people come to Nairobi, you start getting yourself maybe into drug issues. You start getting yourself into a gang. You are doing a gang group here in Nairobi, and you forget what brought you to Nairobi, and you start stealing from people. You start getting yourself into killing people here in Nairobi." 9 Page 16 of 23

Discussion
This study examines how pastoralists and agro-pastoralists who migrated from northern Kenya to Nairobi following severe droughts, perceive success and failure concerning drought-influenced migration. The findings show that such perceptions span a broad spectrum of adaptation-related objectives. Preferences for these objectives, including seemingly maladaptive objectives, were shaped by migrants' experiences and beliefs. Broader social-cultural objectives also constituted important success and failure dimensions. Examining migrants' perceptions, therefore, reveals a more complex and reality-grounded set of migration objectives than that identified through the application of a climate risk analytical lens. However, the identification of this complexity, which constitutes the main strength of this type of research, also contributes to its limitations. The most important limitations stem from the qualitative research design, which limits the sample size and the result's generalizability. Drawing on the case study, we discuss how success and failure perceptions improve our understanding of migration outcomes.
In relation to climate risk, success and failure perceptions broaden our understanding of migrants' adaptation preferences. Many studies frame migration as a livelihood strategy that contributes to remittance flows (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2019;Loebach, 2016;Maharjan et al., 2021;Neog, 2022;Ng'ang'a et al., 2016), an aspect that is captured in this study mainly in the sub-themes pertaining to the fulfillment of families' short-term basic needs. However, the desired objectives identified in this study span a wide spectrum of adaptive returns to migration, from restoring traditional livelihoods in the sending area by rebuilding climate-sensitive livestock, through opening shops that generate climate-resilient income, to potentially transformative intergenerational actions such as investment in children's education. Particularly, the education-as-adaptation channel echoes recent calls to move beyond the examination of remittance flows' direct effects on households' income and livelihood modifications (Bettini, 2017;Singh & Basu, 2020), and stresses the need to adopt a broader and longer-term framing of migration outcomes.
Success and failure perceptions are important also to understand the judgments and beliefs that underpin migrants' adaptation preferences, including seemingly maladaptive ones. For example, preferences to invest in rebuilding drought-sensitive livestock stemmed from two interlinked beliefs: 1. that livestock provides households' needs and thus is a 'complete' source of livelihood relative to wage labor, which constitutes a source of income, and 2. that familiar sources of risk, such as climatic variability, are preferable to the less familiar risks of the labor market. These beliefs emphasize the importance of cultural-occupational identity in shaping livelihood decisions (Few et al., 2021;Wernersson, 2018). However, in certain cases migrants' experiences in Nairobi opened up new spaces for adaptation, as seen in the importance attributed to education as a pathway to climate-resilient livelihoods. This finding highlights a critical yet neglected aspect of the migration-as-adaptation research-that the beliefs and values determining what is (un)desirable may change as migrants are exposed to new realities in the host urban area. As migration will increasingly become long-term, such dynamics must receive greater attention.
Migrants' perceptions and the related concerns and aspirations also determine the full scope of migration objectives and hence its overall success and/or failure. These objectives include social-cultural dimensions that are not linked directly with adaptation, yet contribute to a more complete understanding of migration's effects. For example, the emphasis the literature places on remittances and livelihoods implies that migration outcomes are often analyzed at the household level, viewed as the fundamental economic-functional unit at which the costs and benefits of migration accrue (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2019;Loebach, 2016;Maharjan et al., 2021;Ng'ang'a et al., 2020;Wiederkehr et al., 2018). However, dimensions such as migrants' concerns about losing their families and, on the other hand, their aspiration to accumulate social status in their communities of origin, stress the need to unpack this unit of analysis and examine migration's variegated effects on migrants and their families. The concerns raised by the interviewees also highlight the need to examine not only what migrants seek to gain, but also what they wish to protect, including largely intangible dimensions such as their cultural identity.
Identifying migration's social-cultural objectives assists also in the identification of risks that constitute the fundamental factors shaping the probability of success or failure. The most prominent example relates to the self-failure perceptions linked with succumbing to Nairobi's temptations. These outcomes were often mentioned as the first link in a causal chain that extends to consequent mediating failures such as getting fired and forgetting one's family, which in turn result in migrants' failure as target earners who provide their families basic needs. Identifying these instigating risks, therefore, improves our understanding of how migrants' social-cultural environment might induce negative cascading effects on migration outcomes. Thus, migrants' perceptions reveal the causal structures that underlie proximate successes and failures, including the latent hierarchies that might exist between seemingly unrelated outcomes.
The findings reveal two additional insights. One, in a similar manner to previous studies examining adaptation and climate migration, objectives concerning climate risk reduction were often entangled with migrants' broader aspirations for a better life, highlighted in the economic/labor migration literature (Singh & Basu, 2020;Woodhouse & McCabe, 2018). Two, success and failure are not complete opposites. The different meanings of the sub-themes relating to self-failure vis-à-vis those relating to selfsuccess, and the much higher prevalence of self-failure perceptions, illustrate this. As recent adaptation studies suggest (Tubi & Williams, 2021), these unexclusive sets of objectives imply that any attempt to improve migration outcomes should aim to achieve success while concurrently minimizing the propensity for failure.

Conclusion: from risk reduction to a landscape of (un)desired outcomes
This study shows that rather than evaluating migration effects solely in terms of climate risk, such effects should be analyzed as part of a broader landscape of desired and undesired outcomes. Admittedly, not every desired or undesired effect has direct 9 Page 18 of 23 implications for migration or adaptation policy. Elucidating the entire landscape of migration outcomes will also add to the complexity of research analyzing these outcomes. However, it will provide more accurate and contextualized knowledge that is grounded in migrants' realities and in the future they envision for themselves and their families. If we are to advance policy interventions that maximize successes and minimize failures, we must approach climate-influenced migration through the eyes of those who determine its objectives and navigate the landscape they create.