Youth Mobilization and Environmental Governance: On the Need for Theory and Critical Thinking on Issues of Recognition
Authored by project team member Filip Roumeliotis (Dep. for Environment, Development and Sustainability Studies, Södertörn Univ, Sweden)
Recent years have witnessed a massive, worldwide mobilization of young people around environmental issues. The Fridays for Future movement, for instance, gained intensive media attention when it first emerged in 2018, and has since become one of the most well-known youth organizations. The movement’s initiator, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has been invited to speak at several international, political forums such as the UN Climate Action Summit and the World Economic Forum at Davos. In fact, the emergence of the Fridays for Future movement has led some to describe 2018 as a “watershed moment” in global climate politics, a moment when youth entered environmental politics on a large scale. This massive attention given to young people’s environmental concerns by media and politicians has often been taken as a sign of the political recognition of young people’s right to participate in the public, political debate on environmental issues on par with the adult world.
In a formal sense, this is also true: Greta has been formally invited to political venues central to the environmental debate. Greta has formally been allowed to speak there, taking the opportunity to chastise politicians for their inability or unwillingness to act. Surely this must mean that young people have gained recognition of their importance in the debate on global environmental issues? Surely this recognition has provided young people with a platform from which to enact actual change?
It is at this moment that theoretically informed, critical thinking becomes indispensable as it shifts our perspective away from the most obvious ways in which individuals and groups gain recognition, instead helping us see the subtle ways through which acts of recognition might instead partake in the reproduction of existing power structures. As seen in table 1 below, several theoretical approaches are available for a critical examination of this issue.
Philosopher Judith Butler’s contribution to the theoretical debate on recognition is an important one as it highlights the dual and to some extent problematic nature of recognition. While granting someone recognition constitutes an act through which an individual or group is accorded legitimacy as a partner in social interaction, this recognition also acts to position that individual or group in a certain way, to ascribe a specific identity to them. This means that we need to be attentive to the ways that identities are formed when someone is granted recognition.
Returning to the question of youth mobilization we might therefore follow Butler in asking how youth are positioned in the broader environmental debate, how the very category of “youth” is conceived of (who is included in this category?), what implications this has for the possibility of young people to enact actual change and above all, what (who) is rendered invisible through the specific ways that “youth” have been positioned.
As geographer Sally Neas and her colleagues have noted, recent years have witnessed an intensive interest in the person of Greta Thunberg and the mass mobilizations brought about by the Fridays for Future movement. Politicians such as Barack Obama, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Hollywood stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, among many others, have lined up to be photographed with Thunberg and both the Media as well as research on youth activism have focused extensively on her and the movement she has contributed to found.
Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe has likewise lamented how media only seems to be interested in one climate activist, seeing other young people as “the Greta of their country” or as “following in her footsteps” even though some have been active since long before Thunberg’s arrival on the scene. This testifies to the central position accorded to Greta Thunberg as a general representative of the category “youth” in the public imagination, and the mass mobilizations of the Fridays for Future movement have come to represent the way youth mobilize around environmental issues.
This intensive focus on just one climate activist and one form of environmental activism has been central in cementing a picture of the identity of the “youth activist” that is highly troubling as it simultaneously renders other ways of being and acting invisible. It partakes in the representation of youth environmental activism as a concern of young, mostly white, people living in the Global North, thereby giving precedence to certain experiences of climate change while other experiences are made invisible. The recognition accorded to youth and their activism thus only extends to a highly narrow segment of young people and a select way of acting on environmental issues.
Greta Thunberg has become well aware of this problem and is currently acting to broaden the representation of youth voice as well as the means through which environmental activism is acted out, thereby challenging narrow conceptions of who is allowed to speak and act politically. The question is how this challenge will affect the recognition of youth as legitimate participants in the formation of sustainable environmental politics in the long term as there are already troubling signs that resistance to climate activism is growing.
Research on youth mobilization around environmental issues, therefore, needs to incorporate critical theories to make visible the ways that youth participation in public political work is conditioned. Rather than taking the formal inclusion of young people in the public political debate as a sign of recognition, researchers need to attend to the subtle ways that this recognition partakes in the reproduction of power structures that inhibit political action.
