This paper provides a historical analysis of mobility patterns from Burkina Faso to Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, focusing on how these patterns have continuously reconfigured in the context of multiple crises. While the climate mobility turn has reframed migration as an integral component of climate-dependent livelihood systems, little attention has been devoted to the infrastructures that sustain mobility as an adaptive practice.
This paper addresses this gap by examining the legal, institutional, and ecological conditions that enable people to inhabit spaces simultaneously, namely the 1979 ECOWAS Free Movement Protocol, the complementarities between Sahelian subsistence agriculture and the coastal cash-crop economy, and open-land tenure systems in host areas. It then asks, "What happens when these conditions begin to fail?" Drawing on 56 life-history interviews conducted between 2024 and 2026 in northern Côte d'Ivoire (Korhogo, Ouangolodougou) and central Ghana (Techiman, Nsuta), the paper adopts a translocal approach, tracing three historical sequences that show how, over time, these infrastructures have eroded due to agrarian neoliberal interventions, the ivoirité crisis, climate change, the spread of jihadist insurgencies, and the recent ECOWAS-AES rupture. These findings raise broader questions about protection frameworks that remain organised around categories rather than the regional infrastructures that have made mobility-based adaptation possible.