Youth at climate COPs: an exercise in (suboptimal) planetary care?

By Dr. Laura Bullón-Cassis, Postdoctoral Fellow, Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy, The Geneva Graduate Institute

The 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP 27), scheduled for November this year (2022) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, will be the first COP to feature a Children and Youth Pavilion. The pavilion will be large—250 square meters—and centrally located in the ‘Blue zone’, i.e., the area under UN jurisdiction where negotiations take place. Panels, climate education and art workshops, as well as opportunities for youth to network and showcase their work will cohabit in the space. As delegates will hurry to their next appointment, they will pass by it and will, in doing so, receive a clear message from the conference organizers: climate change is an intergenerational issue that will primarily impact young and future generations, and, further, youth is the main transformational force to tackle the climate crisis. Thus, youth and the youth voice are the principal actors deserving of care in the complex exercise that is a COP.

 Since the 2019 climate strikes spearheaded by Greta Thunberg, this framing of the climate crisis has come to be an increasingly popular perspective. And yet, the ethnographic fieldwork I have been conducting over the past four years has taught me to be wary of it. The notion of care is central to this wariness: here, I will focus on the distinction between being cared about and being cared for; and between care as attention and care as action.

 Being cared about

 Young people have undoubtedly gained ground in getting their voices heard in climate conferences. Examples abound: most events begin with a voice from the “youth”, and panels include a youth speaker. Youth, in that they represent young and future generations, is the obvious victim of the collective failing that the climate crisis represents. The climate emergency will worsen with time and, should one paint the future with a single brushstroke, it is indeed young people who will bear the brunt of it. The voice of young people is something that matters, that is now being cared about. And rightly so: through tenacious strikes, powerful protests, and clever activism, young people across the globe have proved they are a force to be reckoned with and a voice that is here to stay.

Being cared for

And yet, the time I spent with young people in and around COPs was always pervaded with an incredibly deep sense of disappointment. I had come to study youth in the context of my doctoral research at New York University because, like many other frequent attendants of multilateral conferences, I had become increasingly disillusioned with their inability to create political momentum. I began my fieldwork in 2019, just as Fridays for Future strikers gained global prominence. As these young activists attended COP25 in Madrid for the first time and I began interviewing them, I was faced with a much sterner reality: while youth came to COPs for multiple reasons—some were keen on engaging with technical dimensions of the negotiations, others had a particular cause to advocate for or were deeply motivated by their activism—what most had in common was that they found the way they were treated deeply lacking.

 For those who had come to COPs by way of social movements, in particular, the shock was profound: over the last few years, many sacrificed their time, and even sometimes their physical and mental health, for the emergency that is unfolding before their eyes. They called for system change, for a radical rethink of our lives and economies, of what we care for. If youth-led social movements do not see eye-to-eye as to what this change would look like, they share a common frustration with the ways in which planetary boundaries are ignored in favor of wars and GDPs; with being labeled “transformational” and “innovative” when, in their view, they are not calling for new solutions but for a renewed interest in age-old ways of being and living that respect the planet’s natural cycles and capabilities; and with the intimate connection they hold with the climate emergency.

 The youth I spoke with explained to me that while they have taken on climate activism fully, the climate emergency is not in fact theirs to fix. When leaders and headlines say that youth is the greatest source of hope in the climate crisis, they feel failed. Failed by their elders, failed by those in power, failed by political institutions and a ‘system’ that does not serve them. They wanted to walk away from what they saw increasingly as an exercise in futility, but they also did not know what to do next. Since the pandemic, more and more youth have turned towards local activism and solutions and away from more global fora—a shift I explore with colleagues in a shared research project across four European countries. My preliminary fieldwork has led me to local movements such as the Climate Academy in Paris, a buzzing initiative of Mayor Anne Hidalgo that provides a space for young Paris-based climate activists to organize and also conducts climate outreach and education throughout the city.

 In short, while these climate activists at COP25 and COP26 felt cared about in climate COPs, they did not feel cared for.

 Care is attention

 Young people are hardly the only parties feeling uncared for in climate negotiations. Examples include vulnerable states such as Small Islands Developing States and those that face a deadly combination of poor infrastructure and increasingly alarming weather events; indigenous groups whose lands and ways of life have been, and are still being, colonized for profit; and poorer communities who are left to fend for themselves while the rich shelter away.

Caring about a particular group, such as youth, can mean taking attention away from others: opportunities for visibility and resources are limited, and there will be no Indigenous Peoples Pavilion, for example, at COP27. In my fieldwork, tensions sometimes arose between different groups and labels, each of which frame the climate crisis somewhat differently. I have already written about some of the dangers of generationalism – the tendency to describe the world in generational terms— in climate discourse, and have argued it has gendered and racial dimensions, too (NEOS, 2021). As I show in the linked article, the ‘youth’ category, has been conferred a preferential status and thus receives more lenient treatment in multilateral conferences over other identities. Indeed, the UN welcomes a “young citizen,” who “represents the symbolic accommodation of [youth] activism into liberal democratic codes” (Kennelly 2011, 25) and is thus undisruptive to the intergovernmental nature of multilateralism. Further, ‘youth’ has been shown to be a particularly useful social category for the neoliberal project of renegotiating previous welfare and development state entitlements and expectations (Sukarieh and Tannock 2014). Categories such as Indigenous peoples are instead fundamentally disruptive. As a young Indigenous woman shared during COP25, “white climate leaders are endorsed by politicians because they fit into a narrative that does not challenge colonialism and capitalism. We as Indigenous youth have to name the corporations coming into our territory, the decision-makers, the police forces. We have to name those because we are facing them immediately.”

 Care is attention, and attention is powerful and limited in nature; leaders must decide whom to give it to, and this decision will have consequences.

Planetary care

 I am heartened by my young interviewees, who, aware of the pitfalls above and committed to the nexus between climate and social justice, have started to think about and enact alternative pathways and institutional arrangements to make their claims. Some long predated them—such as practices of intimate care for the climate, and activism around COPs—and others are ‘in becoming.’ Perhaps, the lesson this has taught us is how to exercise better planetary care: care should be for all instead of for some and should not come in the shape of attention but in the shape of action. Youth climate strikers have learned that an overfocus on their young age does not serve their goals. A new strategy employed by many has been to extend ‘care’ towards other communities in the shape of a strong endorsement of climate justice.

 What this ‘care’ looks like is very much context specific: at the 2021 Fridays for Future strike in New York City, for example, indigenous youths spoke first, pointing to their ancestors’ ecological practices that predate the very existence of modernist thinking and the United States. At the September 2022 Youth for Climate Strikes in Paris, speeches were instead connected with local worries around immigration and social justice. Like these young people, we must re-learn how to ‘care’ to create a true ecosystem of planetary solidarity, at COPs and beyond.

 References

 Bullon-Cassis L. 2021. Beware of generationalism: the structural (in)visibility of BIPOC youths in global climate summits. NEOS 13 (1).

 Kennelly, J. 2011. Citizen Youth: Culture, Activism and Agency in a Neoliberal Era. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sukarieh, M., and Tannock, S.  2014. Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy. London: Taylor & Francis.