In her ethnography on youth participation in the anti-Apartheid movement, War in Worcester, Pamela Reynolds (2013) acknowledges the importance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created in 1996 to present testimony on the violent excesses of the apartheid regime. At the same time, she is dissatisfied by the template imposed on people's testimonies that would have them self-identify as only victims and speak only of dramatic incidents of violence and trauma. What she ultimately finds unconscionable is the apartheid state's purge of its documents that bore ample testimony to the ways in which it embedded itself in the lives of ordinary South Africans, producing reams of surveillance data through espionage, confiscation and terror.
In asking ourselves why Reynolds would find the destruction of documents so objectionable in the face of the post-apartheid state's efforts to recover the voices of those victimised, what becomes clear is her lament over the larger loss of the documentation of children and youth participation in the anti-apartheid struggle. Despite its excesses or maybe on account of it, the apartheid state attended to children as political beings to be governed, even if its end was to destroy children's capacity for politics. She quotes Verne Harris, an archivist with the South African State Archive Service, as saying, ‘the apparent complete destruction of records confiscated from individuals and organisations over many years by the Security Police has removed from our heritage arguably the country's richest accumulation of records documenting the struggles against apartheid … the details, the nuances, the texture, the activities and experiences of individuals, was absent’ (Reynolds 2013: 7). Through the wholesale destruction of inculpatory records and the imposition of a template on how testimony was to be recorded, children's political participation was written out of history.
Writing about our present, that is, inquiring into how contemporary youth activists, such as Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai, ground their claims to being political, Faisal Devji notes how the youth cannot simply claim the right of participation in politics. ‘It is because they are not responsible for themselves that children cannot have a say in deciding both their own futures and that of others’ (2021: 221). He explores how they are instead forced to occupy an uncanny space of speaking from a future of adulthood yet to come, a positionality that he comes to identify as a form of mediumship, spectrality, even prophesising.
Reynolds’ and Devji's representations of the child as a political actor in two vastly different contexts make explicit the thoroughgoing evacuation of anything comprising not just children's participation in political action, but also their consciousness of themselves as moral and political beings. A diagnostic offered by the two is that children are simply not allowed to represent themselves, either through the excision of their participation, the writing over of their testimony or the pressures on them to dematerialise themselves to channel their adult selves.
Inspired by the two scholars’ efforts to interrogate the basis for exclusion of children from politics and to attend to such politics more carefully, this paper takes up the issue of children's participation in politics through examining the emergence of youth activism around climate change. Social media and news reportage in the Global North record a meteoric rise in children's political advocacy to address the challenges posed by climate change. Given how important the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an institutional framework, was for enabling testimony on the apartheid state, we identify the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as the premier institution on climate change policy that registers and records youth participation in climate politics in order to explore how it does so, with what limits on children in politics. Keeping in mind Reynolds’ concerns over the way the Truth and Reconciliation Commission imposed limits on what was sayable, we sketch the lineaments of the mainstream narrative of youth climate activism to see how they are represented. Finally, we explore how youth climate activists seek to represent themselves, as evidenced by official websites. Given that Devji alerts us to how children must play along with their self-representative limits to be heard in the present, we explore how youth climate activists play along to be impactful in the moment but appear to give little attention to maintaining records of their participation. This produces gaps in the material records making it necessary to rely on patchwork and oral narratives to garner a full picture of youth activity globally. We end by speculating on the importance of self-directed documentation in the present for the future to be able to take on board the hard work and even sacrifices youth are undertaking to secure that future.
Research Undertaken
While recognising the heterogeneity of conceptualisations of children and youth,1 for the purposes of this paper we took the category of youth to include all those who self-identify as such or are identified as such by others.2 We looked at four sets of records to track youth participation in climate politics: mainstream newspapers, the UNFCCC website, media outlets of two organisations that cover the UNFCCC-organised annual Conference of Parties (COP), and websites of various youth climate activist groups. We trained our attention on who represented whom, how the discursive framing changed over time and how youth were involved in their own self-representation. For news articles in the English language on youth participation in climate change policy and politics, we looked at the past 25 years of reportage. Within the UNFCCC website we looked at the past 13 years of records from the formal recognition of youth participation within the climate negotiation process in 2009 to the present. Specifically, we examined archives of side events and exhibits agenda, which occur in the civil society space outside of the negotiations, asking what were the kinds of events and exhibits involving youth, how were youth affiliated with the events and, if youth took on the task of organising their own events, what kind of content did youth prioritise? We also looked at the past 13 years of media outlets, which were external to the UNFCCC process, specifically the ECO Newsletter published by the Climate Action Network and the Earth Negotiations Bulletin published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. We asked how the publications document youth participation, that is, what kind of youth activity was noteworthy for these publications and whether and how they understood youth participation to be necessary within the process. Finally, we critically analysed the websites of youth non-governmental organisation (NGOs), to explore how youth documented their own activities independently of mainstream media, the UNFCCC and advocacy media outlets, asking how self-documentation on these platforms differed from the other sources.3 Within the websites, we distinguished between youth advocacy groups that send regular delegations to UNFCCC conferences and youth activist groups that worked outside the international process. We used the frequency of website maintenance as a gauge for how youth were writing themselves into the records.
Analysis
Much of our work with mainstream media, UNFCCC programming and independent publications focused on participation numbers and mentions of youth activity. These quantitative measures demonstrate, from year to year, a greater significance of youth across all discursive outputs. The civil society space has become increasingly accessible for youth representatives, and process-focused media outlets are covering youth activity more frequently.
While these measures indicate an increase in youth representation, it is not clear if this increase in coverage translates into an increase in youth participation or inclusion. For instance, the consistent rise of youth voices in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin daily reports evidences a greater degree of representation. Their persistent advocacy for the same issues, however, namely ‘a seat at the decision-making table’ for youth, suggests that this representation does not necessarily give way to inclusion. Similarly in the ECO Newsletter, the authors seem to write about youth with the same kind of language despite representing them more frequently in articles; they still abstract youth as a ‘voiceless representation of the future’ (Devji 2021: 223) and generalise youth as a vulnerable population.
Despite this elevated representation, many of the websites of key youth-led climate organisations seemed to exist in a state of neglect. The websites of youth organisations engaged in the process exhibited a greater degree of neglect than those unaffiliated with UNFCCC. There is difficulty reconciling the engagement suggested by the rise in discursive prominence with the current lack of maintenance of youth organisation websites. This drop-off in website maintenance could be due, in part, to the lack of time and resources, or specifically to managerial challenges lingering from the COVID-19 pandemic and organisational burnout. It may also suggest that youth activist groups, particularly those engaged in the process, are overly tied to the UN meeting calendar and have not yet acquired independence from it, which is certainly a concern with respect to the long-term sustainability of youth politics. Or, as we suggest in this paper, this neglect within websites likely derives from the fact that youth, caught up in the urgency of the present, do not give importance to maintaining records, which has negative ramifications for recounting youth participation in climate politics.
Youth Activism in Mainstream Media
It seemed that youth climate activism reached a new height in 2019. Global climate strikes, catalysed by the archetypal Greta Thunberg and attended by four million people, occurred in March and September of that year. Accordingly, news reportage on youth climate advocacy increased dramatically. To track this influx of reportage, we identified articles in the New York Times and The Guardian over the examined 25-year period that explicitly centred youth climate activism as a subject. We selected these news outlets as they are relatively mainstream, with an international reach and with a commitment to covering climate-related issues.
From the news articles, which ranged from cover stories to editorials, we learned that young activists are extraordinarily dissatisfied with current systems of governance and the performance of contemporary political figures, with Greta's criticisms of the COP and world leaders making several headlines (Carrington 2021). They insist on fundamental, radical change to political institutions and economic systems (Margolin 2019). At the same time, they are low on specifics, asserting the need for intervention on moral grounds, demanding action for the climate crisis and justice for those currently affected and unborn generations (Watts 2019). From the examined articles in these two newspapers, many youth groups plan and participate in public demonstrations (Sengupta 2019). Some file lawsuits against polluting corporations (Watts 2020). Others advocate for specific policy interventions, primarily the Green New Deal (Milman 2021). Still more produce viral content on social media platforms (Mersinoglu 2020). And a few organisations resort to civil disobedience (Skopeliti 2022).
At the same time, we found that the news articles do not suggest that children's participation has been increasing or even consistent, or that news focus on them has been steady. We found that, in 2019, articles in the New York Times on youth climate advocacy jumped more than 700%; The Guardian similarly published only four articles about youth climate work in 2018, but 44 articles in 2019. While the number of these articles published since 2019 has remained higher than in the period before 2019, both publications exhibited a significant drop-off. The number of articles in The Guardian fell by around half, and the publication even released the headline ‘Children aren't the future: where have all the young activists gone?’ in summer 2022. Articles in the New York Times fell even more drastically in 2020, to an eighth of the number of articles in 2019, though this number stabilised in 2021 and 2022.
YOUNGOs at the UNFCCC
Ratified in 1994, the UNFCCC remains the only international climate change process at present. The Secretariat of the Convention oversees the organisation of annual conferences, notably the COP, which is the foremost space of multilateral negotiation on climate change. At the 2015 COP21, the Parties to the Convention adopted the Paris Agreement, a treaty aiming to limit greenhouse gas emissions to below 2°C and ideally below 1.5°C. Despite very unpromising early results from the Paris Agreement, its implementation through the negotiation process remains ongoing and very much in the public eye. Beyond the Parties to the Convention, nine civil society constituencies also attend the COPs for a variety of reasons, including performing the function of watchdog for the wider civil society, lobbying with negotiators for specific climate actions, and networking with other NGOs and political groups.
Youth have had a notional place in the process from its start. When it began in 1992 with the Rio Declaration, Principle 21 of the Declaration sought to engage the ‘creativity, ideals, and courage of the youth’. It was not until the days before the 2005 COP11 in Montreal, however, that a coalition of youth organisations mobilised to create the International Youth Climate Movement (IYCM). The UNFCCC Secretariat formally recognised this youth constituency in August 2009, shortly before the disastrous COP15 in Copenhagen. The conference at Copenhagen, distinguished for its total failure to secure a substantial climate plan and its suppression of protests outside the conference centre, prompted the ending of IYCM's provisional status in 2011. This acceptance of the IYCM, now renamed YOUNGO, as an official constituency, at least in part, functioned as a measure to control the civil society activity, which had led to such a degree of chaos in 2009 (Marsden 2011). At present, the YOUNGO constituency is the body through which most youth interact with the process.
During the fortnight-long annual COPs, civil society groups external to the negotiations, which are restricted to country representatives and members of government, help flesh out an extensive agenda of side events and exhibits. These side events are registered and archived in the UNFCCC Side Events and Exhibits Online Registration System (SEORS). On this platform, COP attendees can apply for an event with authorisation from UNFCCC personnel. Although this agenda is ultimately decided by the Secretariat, the content of its events and exhibits is determined by the participating Parties and civil society representatives. We mined this SEORS archive from 2009, when YOUNGO received its provisional constituency status, to the most recent COP26 in Glasgow. To study youth participation in these side events, we identified event listings that designated youth representatives, delegations and NGOs as speakers or organisers. While we considered all groups that self-identified as youth-led on their official websites and Facebook accounts, we also cross-checked these participants with a list of organisations with YOUNGO status. We identified exhibits that showcased youth-led projects, such as research into NDCs and virtual educational modules in 2022. These exhibits differ from events in their permanence in the COP space and the legend by which they are organised on the database.
The SEORS archive indicated that youth engagement has increased dramatically over this interval, with a more than 200% increase in events and exhibits featuring youth participation. In particular, the number of side events that met this criterion increased from only eight events in 2009 to twenty-eight in 2021. The greatest increase occurred between 2018 and 2019, with a 100% increase from eleven to twenty-two, which correlates with the increase in youth activism in news reportage. The number of exhibits remained largely consistent over the interval at around seven youth-led exhibits each year. Years with significantly low event participation demonstrated an inversely proportional increase in exhibit participation. In 2011, for example, we identified only four events with youth organisers or speakers. We identified thirteen exhibits in the same year, however – the highest count across the period.
Additionally, the content of youth-led events and exhibits became increasingly focalised across the period. Early in the period, events such as ‘Investing in Girls to Save the Planet’ in 2009 and ‘Climate Justice: African Youth Perspective’ in 2010 seemed to deal simply with the presence of youth in a space like the COP. In the schedule for the 2021 COP, however, we noticed the specificity of youth-related events and exhibits, with titles like ‘Advancing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience’ and ‘Civil Society Equity Review of Fossil Fuel Extraction and Assessing Canadian Oil & Gas Climate Plans’.
We noticed that multiple events and exhibits seemed to be the products of partnerships between youth participants and counterparts in other constituencies. Youth NGOs typically shared these events and exhibits with the Women and Gender Constituency and Indigenous Peoples Organizations. The number of events and exhibits shared with the Women and Gender Constituency, for instance, more than tripled across the period, from only two side events in 2009 to seven in 2021, being 25% of youth-related events and exhibits for that year. Similarly, although no events or exhibits shared with the Indigenous Peoples Organizations during the first two years of the study period, there were three events in 2021 which explicitly included Indigenous representatives, such as a panel on Indigenous rights in climate action and presentation of ‘traditional knowledge’ through storytelling and artwork.
Events and exhibits organised by international youth organisations rose considerably over the interval, from around 35% of identified events and exhibits in 2009 to more than 58% of those in 2021. Events organised by regional groups, such as Fundacíon Futuro Latinamericano and Federation of European Greens from 2021, also seemed to be on the rise in the archive. Participation from national delegations and organisations remained relatively consistent throughout the period.
The SEORS archive also shifted its mode of attribution over the interval. In 2009, around 24% of the selected youth events and exhibits were attributed simply to ‘youth representatives’ or ‘young innovators’. In 2021, these vague attributions fell to approximately 11% of youth-related events and exhibits, and attribution became increasingly specific, listing the names of youth organisations or individual youth organisers and speakers.
According to the SEORS archive, youth seemed to not only participate more but also more substantially. Youth, in 2021, organised and spoke at more events. The events and exhibits coordinated by youth organisations contribute more specific knowledge to the process. Young people collaborated with more civil society groups and operated on an increasingly international level, as indicated by the rising significance of international and regional organisations.
Categories of Youth Politics within Independent Media Outlets
Climate Action Network is a network of international NGOs and environmental groups coordinating a position within the negotiations. They only exist within the process. The International Institute for Sustainable Development, however, is a progressive think tank, which monitors a whole slew of international processes, including 49 other negotiations. While both outfits release timely information about each day of the COPs, the ECO Newsletter distinguishes itself with polemical commentary on the often-dissatisfactory negotiations at UNFCCC conferences, while the Earth Negotiations Bulletin aspires to neutral summary reports.
The ECO Newsletter is distributed daily to participants as they enter the COP meeting spaces and ‘reflects CAN's [Climate Action Network's] perspective and position on climate negotiations’. These perspectives, like their ‘Fossil of the Day’ column, are often assertive, openly criticising delegations for conservative engagement with the negotiations. We selected the ECO Newsletter for this research because of its relative longevity at UNFCCC events and deep archives.
The archives of these daily issues reach as far back as 2010. From 2010 to 2021, we identified 57 articles that either credited a youth organisation member as a guest contributor, centred youth as a subject or mentioned youth in the content of the article. The number of articles that met this criterion increased from only two articles in 2010, to sixteen during the 2019 COP in Madrid and eight at the 2021 COP in Glasgow.
Youth were largely subsumed within two categories. Under one category youth were aggregated with other ‘vulnerable populations’, notably ‘women’, ‘Indigenous Peoples’, ‘the poor’ and ‘persons with disabilities’. More rarely, these ‘vulnerable populations’ included ‘the Global South’, ‘workers’ and ‘LGBTQI+’. This mode of description almost always took the form of a list with at least three other ‘populations’. This category demonstrated a sharp increase, particularly from 2019; in 2021, it made up around 63% of the selected articles. Typically, its usage functioned to advocate for a greater degree of inclusion in the process, sometimes with specific references to UNFCCC structural exclusion. To track documentation of youth after the last COP in Glasgow which, according to news sources, was supposed to mark the ‘arrival’ of youth, we also examined the ECO Newsletter from the most recent UNFCCC intercessions in June 2022. The three articles mentioning youth fell under this subset and advocated for alterations to the meeting structure to bring vulnerable populations within the process.
A second category under which youth were subsumed associated youth with unborn generations. Comprising around 19% of the selected articles, this categorisation almost always included the phrase ‘children and grandchildren’ or ‘youth and future generations’. One article, written by an Indigenous contributor, used this language to seek temporal continuity, writing ‘to understand who we are in relation to our ancestors, our grandchildren’. These two categories stayed stable and unchanging across the study period.
The ECO Newsletter rarely published articles with an exclusive focus on youth. Of the nine articles that did so across the eleven years, most of these pieces discussed activist activity completely outside of the UNFCCC context, typically focusing on relatively acute forms of activism, such as Brazilian youth environmental non-governmental organisation members suspected of arson in 2019 and the Sunrise Movement's hunger strike in 2021. Although mentioned on occasion, this type of activism was infrequently profiled over the period. A moderate increase in frequency of this type of article correlates with the increased reportage of youth activist activity within mainstream news reportage.
While not strongly focused on youth participation in climate politics, the ECO Newsletter regularly invites COP attendees to write articles, particularly in one of its regular columns such as ‘Voices from the Front Lines’ featured during 2018 COP24. We identified eight articles written by young people from 2010 to the present. Many of these articles were written collaboratively and were attributed not to organisations but instead generalised groups such as the ‘Youth of Australia’ or ‘Young Indigenous Peoples’. These articles seem to have increased in frequency in recent years but also continue to maintain low numbers.
We also examined the Earth Negotiations Bulletin newsletter published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. We specifically looked at the ‘report of main proceedings’ for each day of the COPs. As mentioned above, these reports were significantly less polemical than the ECO Newsletter and, instead, attempt to provide a summary of negotiation proceedings. From the 2015 COP21 in Paris to the 2021 Glasgow COP26, we identified 80 passages documenting youth participation. These typically manifested as youth representatives speaking to the COP plenary or YOUNGO representatives advocating for greater accessibility and various policy interventions at other settings within the COPs. In our count, we also included Parties and delegates advocating for youth-related issues.
Youth representation in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin ‘report of main proceedings’ varied across the examined period but generally increased, from six mentions in 2015, and only two in 2015, to fifteen in 2022. Again, this uptick occurred primarily in 2019, with a 250% increase in mentions between 2018 and 2019. In contrast to the ECO Newsletter, however, in which mention of youth dropped off after 2019, Earth Negotiations Bulletin saw sustained growth, with a 150% increase in mentions of youth from 2019 to 2021. The majority of these mentions focus exclusively on youth as a subject in their own right, advocating for a greater degree of inclusion in the process or various policy changes.
Gauging from the ECO Newsletter, youth have found a position among the vulnerable populations of climate politics, but they have also come into force as a constituency and an actor in the international process. And as evidenced by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, youth appear more frequently in the actual proceedings of negotiations. Thus, these publications, external to the UNFCC and not a part of mainstream media, would seem to indicate that youth participate in the UNFCCC process to a greater degree than ever before.
Representing Themselves
We analysed the websites of youth organisations to explore modes of organisational self-representation, focusing on two youth group categories: first, advocacy-oriented groups engaged with the UNFCCC process and, second, more informal, youth-led activist groups. We largely sourced organisations for the former category from the SEORS archive and those in the latter from news reportage. We also looked at national and regional branches of organisations, when available. To supplement this analysis, we examined some Facebook and Twitter pages. Because we looked at these websites as a self-representation of activity, we looked mostly for recently and regularly updated information in blogs, event calendars, records of ‘impact’ and image galleries. As a result, we will not provide an assessment of overall website quality.
The websites of process-specific organisations vary in layout and accessibility. In general, these groups have not necessarily prioritised visual design: they do not use stylised logos or bright colours. The homepages almost always feature a tab for their conference delegations, a blog and a donation page. They frequently include pictures of youth participating in workshops, panels and demonstrations.
We began our survey of process-specific organisations with the official YOUNGO website. The security certificate for the domain of this official website (youngoclimate.org) expired on 2 June, 2022 and has not been renewed at the time of writing this paper. Visitors to the site are prompted with a message that ‘Attackers might be trying to steal your information from youngoclimate.org’. Visitors who try to circumvent this message are, again, warned that the site is ‘unsafe’ before being able to proceed to the website. The blog section of the website has not been updated since May 2022. Although the YOUNGO website appears mostly defunct over summer 2022, the mailing list, which visitors can join from the website, is very active. YOUNGO working groups continue to meet virtually, organisations lead trainings and focal points coordinate activity.
We then directed our attention to the website of youth-led organisation SustainUS, which has worked to mobilise youth from the United States for 20 years. They have sent regular delegations to COPs and consistently organised side events in the COP space. Like many of these organisations, SustainUS prioritises informing visitors about their ‘impact’ and recent programming. In early July 2022, however, the organisation released a memo looking to ‘reawaken’ their advocacy activity after a year and a half of ‘internal work, harm reduction, and reconciliation’. According to this message, the group has been reduced to a ‘handful’ of personnel over this period. Despite this inactivity, the homepage of their website states that ‘2019 was our biggest year yet’, although the blog attached to the website hasn't been updated since 2018.
We then investigated some of the organisations at the forefront of climate work in the early years of this centralised youth constituency. Published in 2014, At the COP: Global Climate Justice Youth Speak Out collects interviews with the leadership of some of the world's foremost youth-led organisations, including the Arab Youth Climate Movement (AYCM); a contemporaneous article from The Guardian substantiates the standing of this organisation (Rigg 2012). The official AYCM Facebook and LinkedIn pages remain intact, but the website linked to both pages (aycm.org) no longer exists. The Iraqi national branch of the AYCM has a website that has not been updated in four years. Similarly, the website of the Syrian branch states that greenhouse gas emissions need to peak ‘between 2015 and 2017’. The website of the Qatar branch indicates that they are still active and send delegations to the COP, but the AYCM has largely died out without a real replacement. Though AYCM could still be organising on a channel that we cannot access, it seems unlikely, as a recent Middle East Institute article writes about their dormancy, in anticipation for COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (Shafi 2022).
The general aesthetic of activist organisations, including the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion Youth and Fridays for Future, tends to rely on punchy, cohesive design. All three organisations listed above prominently feature a stylised logo and a colour palette with one primary colour against black and white. They focus heavily on informing visitors of their platform and recruiting them to their movement. The visual style of these sites often prioritises imagery of youth activists at marches or rallies. In large part, these activist organisations have sustained their activity since 2019.4 These organisations hosted regular virtual and in-person meetings, updated their blogs at consistent intervals and alerted users of recent progress.
While the documentation from UNFCCC programming and related publications would indicate that youth involvement in the climate process sustains a global high, the actual organisations demonstrate a more complicated relationship to the level of participation from 2019. Many of these process-specific organisations continue to operate and produce ‘impacts’ but the task of documenting this activity seems to be neglected within the organisations.
Discussion
Scholarship on youth involvement in politics has tended to take two broad paths. Along the first, scholarship has focused heavily on child soldiers, their entrapment, rescue and integration into mainstream society (Drumbl 2012; Rosen 2007). In writing War in Worcester, Reynolds attempted to break from this path or at least to nuance it further by suggesting that while some children are forcibly conscripted into violence, others step up to it as much out of a commitment to political ideals, such as liberty and freedom, as out of necessity. Reynolds employs ‘the small scale of mini-narratives’ to better capture the political engagement of the men whom she interviews who as children hurled themselves against the apartheid state (2013: 19). Simultaneously, she insists on the importance of documentary evidence in not just grounding the claims of those she studied but in capturing the voices of the many others now permanently left out of the records.
In his ‘The Childhood of Politics’, Faisal Devji makes an overarching argument about the exclusion of the voice of the child from politics, which is more a comment on politics than a peon to children's politics. While Devji does not concern himself with the importance of documentation as such, the readings he provides of Greta Thunberg's recently published autobiography draw out the nuances of her unconventional political engagement, which would have been erased by an exclusive focus on Fridays for Future's weekly strikes. In so far as he looks to literature and political writings to excavate the figure of the child as a political being, Devji suggests the importance of texts as much as oral narratives in attending to this elusive figure within the history of politics.
Along the second path of scholarship of youth participation in politics, we have a groundswell of analytical writing on youth climate activism in the UNFCCC process that we have highlighted in this paper. Researchers have explored youth weaponisation of ‘snark’ (Curnow 2021), maintenance of accountability (Kuyper and Bäckstrand 2016) and assembly of networks (Gunningham 2019) in making their presence known and impactful within climate policy negotiations. However, this scholarship has tended to treat youth activism in an entirely presentist manner, concerned with studying what is happening now, rather than relating it to a history and potential future of youth involvement and exclusion. Furthermore, they have not taken the time to see how youth participation registers within the public sphere and across diverse domains, whose representations of youth politics stand to make or break it.
For our part, we have made a first pass at parsing out how youth appear within four sources of the written record. It seems that the available documentation does not account for the complexities of how youth engage with the international climate process and, in turn, how the process acts on youth. The current state of documentation on youth engagement in the process cannot disambiguate this increase in youth representation from actual participation or inclusion in decision-making rooms. It cannot accurately capture the depth of internal work, as seen with the recent SustainUS memo, or the nuances of youth participation.
This paper does not claim that youth have not been adequately involved in the political space of climate action, but instead that youth may be being more subtly written out. The documentation reviewed in earlier sections of this article operates on a strict definition of the political, often isolating it to specific action within the negotiation space. With the emergence of youth, the UNFCCC Secretariat seems to be making a deliberate effort to elevate youth representation, in both the civil society space and the negotiation rooms. Concurrently, climate-related media sources more actively centre youth participation. However, rather than redefining the political, the UNFCCC seems instead to have opted for making accessibility and representation the lynchpin of youth politics. In doing so, the UNFCCC indicates that it perceives youth as a pre-political entity, a medium of future generations, capable of little more than moral pressure. This elevation of representation, however, only partially responds to the requests of youth, and other vulnerable populations, for inclusion in climate decision-making. The growth of politically active youth groups independent of the UNFCCC process could be a result of this continued perception of young people of their subtle exclusion.
In conclusion, we advocate for the capture of lost voices through the adoption of different genres (Han and Brandel 2019), but documentation – the act of inscribing – remains critical to adequately recording the political subjectivity of children, rather than their victimhood in face of the climate emergency.
Notes
Faisal Devji, in the essay mentioned above, rejects biological and legal definitions of childhood, favouring instead an understanding of childhood as ‘a rhetorical device to separate one world of action, responsibility, or experience from another’ (2021: 222).
YOUNGO website, touchstone for our analysis of organisational self-representation, defines youth as younger than 35.
To produce this kind of analysis, we looked at the procedures outlined in ‘Website Experience Analysis: A New Research Protocol for Studying Relationship Building on Corporate Websites’ by Mihaela Vorvoreanu (2008) as well as ‘How-to-Analyze Webpages’ by Emilia Djonov and John Knox, in Interactions, Images, and Texts: A Reader in Multimodality (2014).
The official, international website for FFF seemed to be the single exception for these activist organisations, but the social media feeds and websites for national branches seemed very active.
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