The Problem with Children in Politics - The Documentary Evidence of Youth Climate Activism - Berghahn Journals
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The Problem with Children in Politics
The Documentary Evidence of Youth Climate Activism
Naveeda Khan and Charles Nuermberger
Abstract: Inspired by the forceful emergence of youth activism around climate change in 2019
and the body of scholarship on youth political involvement, we evaluate youths’ claims to
being political in the international climate governance process. To do this, we survey docu-
mentation of youth activity around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), so we can gauge the extent of youth participation. We produce analyses
of four sets of records: mainstream newspapers, UNFCCC programming, independent media
outlets and youth NGO websites. We find that, while youth are participating more, existing
forms of documentation are inadequate. We suggest that genre writing can capture lost voices
in politics, and that standard documentation remains critically important to recording youth
political participation.
Keywords: climate activism, climate governance, documentation, UNFCCC, youth
In her ethnography on youth participation in the apartheid struggle. Despite its excesses or maybe on
anti-Apartheid movement, War in Worcester, Pamela account of it, the apartheid state attended to children
Reynolds (2013) acknowledges the importance of the as political beings to be governed, even if its end
Truth and Reconciliation Commission created in 1996 was to destroy children’s capacity for politics. She
to present testimony on the violent excesses of the quotes Verne Harris, an archivist with the South
apartheid regime. At the same time, she is dissatis- African State Archive Service, as saying, ‘the appar-
fied by the template imposed on people’s testimonies ent complete destruction of records confiscated from
that would have them self-identify as only victims individuals and organisations over many years by
and speak only of dramatic incidents of violence and the Security Police has removed from our heritage
trauma. What she ultimately finds unconscionable is arguably the country’s richest accumulation of re-
the apartheid state’s purge of its documents that bore cords documenting the struggles against apartheid
ample testimony to the ways in which it embedded … the details, the nuances, the texture, the activities
itself in the lives of ordinary South Africans, produc- and experiences of individuals, was absent’ (Reyn-
ing reams of surveillance data through espionage, olds 2013: 7). Through the wholesale destruction of
confiscation and terror. inculpatory records and the imposition of a template
In asking ourselves why Reynolds would find on how testimony was to be recorded, children’s po-
the destruction of documents so objectionable in the litical participation was written out of history.
face of the post-apartheid state’s efforts to recover Writing about our present, that is, inquiring into
the voices of those victimised, what becomes clear how contemporary youth activists, such as Greta
is her lament over the larger loss of the documenta- Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai, ground their claims
tion of children and youth participation in the anti- to being political, Faisal Devji notes how the youth
Anthropology in Action, 29, no. 3 (Winter 2022): 31–39 © The Author(s)
ISSN 0967-201X (Print) ISSN 1752-2285 (Online)
doi:10.3167/aia.2022.290304AiA | Naveeda Khan and Charles Nuermberger cannot simply claim the right of participation in portance of self-directed documentation in the pres- politics. ‘It is because they are not responsible for ent for the future to be able to take on board the hard themselves that children cannot have a say in decid- work and even sacrifices youth are undertaking to ing both their own futures and that of others’ (2021: secure that future. 221). He explores how they are instead forced to oc- cupy an uncanny space of speaking from a future of adulthood yet to come, a positionality that he comes Research Undertaken to identify as a form of mediumship, spectrality, even prophesising. While recognising the heterogeneity of conceptu- Reynolds’ and Devji’s representations of the child alisations of children and youth,1 for the purposes of as a political actor in two vastly different contexts this paper we took the category of youth to include make explicit the thoroughgoing evacuation of any- all those who self-identify as such or are identified thing comprising not just children’s participation in as such by others.2 We looked at four sets of records political action, but also their consciousness of them- to track youth participation in climate politics: main- selves as moral and political beings. A diagnostic stream newspapers, the UNFCCC website, media offered by the two is that children are simply not al- outlets of two organisations that cover the UNFCCC- lowed to represent themselves, either through the ex- organised annual Conference of Parties (COP), and cision of their participation, the writing over of their websites of various youth climate activist groups. testimony or the pressures on them to dematerialise We trained our attention on who represented whom, themselves to channel their adult selves. how the discursive framing changed over time and Inspired by the two scholars’ efforts to interrogate how youth were involved in their own self-repre- the basis for exclusion of children from politics and sentation. For news articles in the English language to attend to such politics more carefully, this pa- on youth participation in climate change policy and per takes up the issue of children’s participation in politics, we looked at the past 25 years of reportage. politics through examining the emergence of youth Within the UNFCCC website we looked at the past activism around climate change. Social media and 13 years of records from the formal recognition of news reportage in the Global North record a mete- youth participation within the climate negotiation oric rise in children’s political advocacy to address process in 2009 to the present. Specifically, we ex- the challenges posed by climate change. Given how amined archives of side events and exhibits agenda, important the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which occur in the civil society space outside of the an institutional framework, was for enabling testi- negotiations, asking what were the kinds of events mony on the apartheid state, we identify the United and exhibits involving youth, how were youth affili- Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ated with the events and, if youth took on the task (UNFCCC) as the premier institution on climate of organising their own events, what kind of content change policy that registers and records youth par- did youth prioritise? We also looked at the past 13 ticipation in climate politics in order to explore how years of media outlets, which were external to the it does so, with what limits on children in politics. UNFCCC process, specifically the ECO Newsletter Keeping in mind Reynolds’ concerns over the way published by the Climate Action Network and the the Truth and Reconciliation Commission imposed Earth Negotiations Bulletin published by the Inter- limits on what was sayable, we sketch the linea- national Institute for Sustainable Development. We ments of the mainstream narrative of youth climate asked how the publications document youth partici- activism to see how they are represented. Finally, we pation, that is, what kind of youth activity was note- explore how youth climate activists seek to represent worthy for these publications and whether and how themselves, as evidenced by official websites. Given they understood youth participation to be necessary that Devji alerts us to how children must play along within the process. Finally, we critically analysed the with their self-representative limits to be heard in websites of youth non-governmental organisation the present, we explore how youth climate activists (NGOs), to explore how youth documented their play along to be impactful in the moment but appear own activities independently of mainstream media, to give little attention to maintaining records of their the UNFCCC and advocacy media outlets, asking participation. This produces gaps in the material how self-documentation on these platforms differed records making it necessary to rely on patchwork from the other sources.3 Within the websites, we and oral narratives to garner a full picture of youth distinguished between youth advocacy groups that activity globally. We end by speculating on the im- send regular delegations to UNFCCC conferences 32 |
The Problem with Children in Politics | AiA
and youth activist groups that worked outside the do not give importance to maintaining records, which
international process. We used the frequency of has negative ramifications for recounting youth par-
website maintenance as a gauge for how youth were ticipation in climate politics.
writing themselves into the records.
Youth Activism in Mainstream Media
Analysis
It seemed that youth climate activism reached a new
Much of our work with mainstream media, UN- height in 2019. Global climate strikes, catalysed by
FCCC programming and independent publications the archetypal Greta Thunberg and attended by four
focused on participation numbers and mentions of million people, occurred in March and September
youth activity. These quantitative measures dem- of that year. Accordingly, news reportage on youth
onstrate, from year to year, a greater significance of climate advocacy increased dramatically. To track
youth across all discursive outputs. The civil society this influx of reportage, we identified articles in the
space has become increasingly accessible for youth New York Times and The Guardian over the examined
representatives, and process-focused media outlets 25-year period that explicitly centred youth climate
are covering youth activity more frequently. activism as a subject. We selected these news outlets
While these measures indicate an increase in as they are relatively mainstream, with an interna-
youth representation, it is not clear if this increase tional reach and with a commitment to covering
in coverage translates into an increase in youth par- climate-related issues.
ticipation or inclusion. For instance, the consistent From the news articles, which ranged from cover
rise of youth voices in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin stories to editorials, we learned that young activists
daily reports evidences a greater degree of repre- are extraordinarily dissatisfied with current systems
sentation. Their persistent advocacy for the same is- of governance and the performance of contempo-
sues, however, namely ‘a seat at the decision-making rary political figures, with Greta’s criticisms of the
table’ for youth, suggests that this representation COP and world leaders making several headlines
does not necessarily give way to inclusion. Similarly (Carrington 2021). They insist on fundamental, radi-
in the ECO Newsletter, the authors seem to write cal change to political institutions and economic
about youth with the same kind of language despite systems (Margolin 2019). At the same time, they are
representing them more frequently in articles; they low on specifics, asserting the need for intervention
still abstract youth as a ‘voiceless representation of on moral grounds, demanding action for the climate
the future’ (Devji 2021: 223) and generalise youth as crisis and justice for those currently affected and
a vulnerable population. unborn generations (Watts 2019). From the exam-
Despite this elevated representation, many of ined articles in these two newspapers, many youth
the websites of key youth-led climate organisations groups plan and participate in public demonstra-
seemed to exist in a state of neglect. The websites of tions (Sengupta 2019). Some file lawsuits against
youth organisations engaged in the process exhibited polluting corporations (Watts 2020). Others advo-
a greater degree of neglect than those unaffiliated cate for specific policy interventions, primarily the
with UNFCCC. There is difficulty reconciling the en- Green New Deal (Milman 2021). Still more produce
gagement suggested by the rise in discursive promi- viral content on social media platforms (Mersinoglu
nence with the current lack of maintenance of youth 2020). And a few organisations resort to civil disobe-
organisation websites. This drop-off in website main- dience (Skopeliti 2022).
tenance could be due, in part, to the lack of time and At the same time, we found that the news articles
resources, or specifically to managerial challenges lin- do not suggest that children’s participation has been
gering from the COVID-19 pandemic and organisa- increasing or even consistent, or that news focus on
tional burnout. It may also suggest that youth activist them has been steady. We found that, in 2019, articles
groups, particularly those engaged in the process, are in the New York Times on youth climate advocacy
overly tied to the UN meeting calendar and have not jumped more than 700%; The Guardian similarly pub-
yet acquired independence from it, which is certainly lished only four articles about youth climate work
a concern with respect to the long-term sustainability in 2018, but 44 articles in 2019. While the number
of youth politics. Or, as we suggest in this paper, this of these articles published since 2019 has remained
neglect within websites likely derives from the fact higher than in the period before 2019, both publica-
that youth, caught up in the urgency of the present, tions exhibited a significant drop-off. The number
| 33AiA | Naveeda Khan and Charles Nuermberger
of articles in The Guardian fell by around half, and restricted to country representatives and members
the publication even released the headline ‘Children of government, help flesh out an extensive agenda
aren’t the future: where have all the young activists of side events and exhibits. These side events are
gone?’ in summer 2022. Articles in the New York Times registered and archived in the UNFCCC Side Events
fell even more drastically in 2020, to an eighth of the and Exhibits Online Registration System (SEORS).
number of articles in 2019, though this number stabi- On this platform, COP attendees can apply for an
lised in 2021 and 2022. event with authorisation from UNFCCC person-
nel. Although this agenda is ultimately decided by
the Secretariat, the content of its events and exhib-
YOUNGOs at the UNFCCC its is determined by the participating Parties and
civil society representatives. We mined this SEORS
Ratified in 1994, the UNFCCC remains the only in- archive from 2009, when YOUNGO received its
ternational climate change process at present. The provisional constituency status, to the most recent
Secretariat of the Convention oversees the organisa- COP26 in Glasgow. To study youth participation in
tion of annual conferences, notably the COP, which these side events, we identified event listings that
is the foremost space of multilateral negotiation on designated youth representatives, delegations and
climate change. At the 2015 COP21, the Parties to the NGOs as speakers or organisers. While we consid-
Convention adopted the Paris Agreement, a treaty ered all groups that self-identified as youth-led on
aiming to limit greenhouse gas emissions to below their official websites and Facebook accounts, we
2°C and ideally below 1.5°C. Despite very unpromis- also cross-checked these participants with a list of
ing early results from the Paris Agreement, its imple- organisations with YOUNGO status. We identified
mentation through the negotiation process remains exhibits that showcased youth-led projects, such as
ongoing and very much in the public eye. Beyond the research into NDCs and virtual educational modules
Parties to the Convention, nine civil society constitu- in 2022. These exhibits differ from events in their
encies also attend the COPs for a variety of reasons, permanence in the COP space and the legend by
including performing the function of watchdog for which they are organised on the database.
the wider civil society, lobbying with negotiators for The SEORS archive indicated that youth engage-
specific climate actions, and networking with other ment has increased dramatically over this interval,
NGOs and political groups. with a more than 200% increase in events and ex-
Youth have had a notional place in the process hibits featuring youth participation. In particular,
from its start. When it began in 1992 with the Rio the number of side events that met this criterion
Declaration, Principle 21 of the Declaration sought increased from only eight events in 2009 to twenty-
to engage the ‘creativity, ideals, and courage of the eight in 2021. The greatest increase occurred between
youth’. It was not until the days before the 2005 2018 and 2019, with a 100% increase from eleven to
COP11 in Montreal, however, that a coalition of twenty-two, which correlates with the increase in
youth organisations mobilised to create the Inter- youth activism in news reportage. The number of
national Youth Climate Movement (IYCM). The exhibits remained largely consistent over the interval
UNFCCC Secretariat formally recognised this youth at around seven youth-led exhibits each year. Years
constituency in August 2009, shortly before the di- with significantly low event participation demon-
sastrous COP15 in Copenhagen. The conference at strated an inversely proportional increase in exhibit
Copenhagen, distinguished for its total failure to participation. In 2011, for example, we identified
secure a substantial climate plan and its suppression only four events with youth organisers or speakers.
of protests outside the conference centre, prompted We identified thirteen exhibits in the same year, how-
the ending of IYCM’s provisional status in 2011. This ever – the highest count across the period.
acceptance of the IYCM, now renamed YOUNGO, Additionally, the content of youth-led events and
as an official constituency, at least in part, functioned exhibits became increasingly focalised across the
as a measure to control the civil society activity, period. Early in the period, events such as ‘Invest-
which had led to such a degree of chaos in 2009 ing in Girls to Save the Planet’ in 2009 and ‘Climate
(Marsden 2011). At present, the YOUNGO constitu- Justice: African Youth Perspective’ in 2010 seemed to
ency is the body through which most youth interact deal simply with the presence of youth in a space like
with the process. the COP. In the schedule for the 2021 COP, however,
During the fortnight-long annual COPs, civil so- we noticed the specificity of youth-related events
ciety groups external to the negotiations, which are and exhibits, with titles like ‘Advancing Sexual and
34 |The Problem with Children in Politics | AiA
Reproductive Health and Rights for Climate Change Categories of Youth Politics within
Adaptation and Resilience’ and ‘Civil Society Equity Independent Media Outlets
Review of Fossil Fuel Extraction and Assessing Cana-
dian Oil & Gas Climate Plans’. Climate Action Network is a network of international
We noticed that multiple events and exhibits NGOs and environmental groups coordinating a po-
seemed to be the products of partnerships between sition within the negotiations. They only exist within
youth participants and counterparts in other constit- the process. The International Institute for Sustain-
uencies. Youth NGOs typically shared these events able Development, however, is a progressive think
and exhibits with the Women and Gender Con- tank, which monitors a whole slew of international
stituency and Indigenous Peoples Organizations. processes, including 49 other negotiations. While
The number of events and exhibits shared with the both outfits release timely information about each
Women and Gender Constituency, for instance, more day of the COPs, the ECO Newsletter distinguishes
than tripled across the period, from only two side itself with polemical commentary on the often-
events in 2009 to seven in 2021, being 25% of youth- dissatisfactory negotiations at UNFCCC conferences,
related events and exhibits for that year. Similarly, while the Earth Negotiations Bulletin aspires to neutral
although no events or exhibits shared with the In- summary reports.
digenous Peoples Organizations during the first two The ECO Newsletter is distributed daily to par-
years of the study period, there were three events ticipants as they enter the COP meeting spaces and
in 2021 which explicitly included Indigenous repre- ‘reflects CAN’s [Climate Action Network’s] perspec-
sentatives, such as a panel on Indigenous rights in tive and position on climate negotiations’. These
climate action and presentation of ‘traditional knowl- perspectives, like their ‘Fossil of the Day’ column,
edge’ through storytelling and artwork. are often assertive, openly criticising delegations for
Events and exhibits organised by international conservative engagement with the negotiations. We
youth organisations rose considerably over the inter- selected the ECO Newsletter for this research because
val, from around 35% of identified events and exhib- of its relative longevity at UNFCCC events and deep
its in 2009 to more than 58% of those in 2021. Events archives.
organised by regional groups, such as Fundacíon The archives of these daily issues reach as far back
Futuro Latinamericano and Federation of European as 2010. From 2010 to 2021, we identified 57 articles
Greens from 2021, also seemed to be on the rise in that either credited a youth organisation member as a
the archive. Participation from national delegations guest contributor, centred youth as a subject or men-
and organisations remained relatively consistent tioned youth in the content of the article. The number
throughout the period. of articles that met this criterion increased from only
The SEORS archive also shifted its mode of attri- two articles in 2010, to sixteen during the 2019 COP
bution over the interval. In 2009, around 24% of the in Madrid and eight at the 2021 COP in Glasgow.
selected youth events and exhibits were attributed Youth were largely subsumed within two catego-
simply to ‘youth representatives’ or ‘young innova- ries. Under one category youth were aggregated with
tors’. In 2021, these vague attributions fell to approxi- other ‘vulnerable populations’, notably ‘women’,
mately 11% of youth-related events and exhibits, and ‘Indigenous Peoples’, ‘the poor’ and ‘persons with
attribution became increasingly specific, listing the disabilities’. More rarely, these ‘vulnerable popula-
names of youth organisations or individual youth tions’ included ‘the Global South’, ‘workers’ and ‘LG-
organisers and speakers. BTQI+’. This mode of description almost always took
According to the SEORS archive, youth seemed to the form of a list with at least three other ‘popula-
not only participate more but also more substantially. tions’. This category demonstrated a sharp increase,
Youth, in 2021, organised and spoke at more events. particularly from 2019; in 2021, it made up around
The events and exhibits coordinated by youth organ- 63% of the selected articles. Typically, its usage func-
isations contribute more specific knowledge to the tioned to advocate for a greater degree of inclusion
process. Young people collaborated with more civil in the process, sometimes with specific references to
society groups and operated on an increasingly inter- UNFCCC structural exclusion. To track documenta-
national level, as indicated by the rising significance tion of youth after the last COP in Glasgow which,
of international and regional organisations. according to news sources, was supposed to mark
the ‘arrival’ of youth, we also examined the ECO
Newsletter from the most recent UNFCCC interces-
sions in June 2022. The three articles mentioning
| 35AiA | Naveeda Khan and Charles Nuermberger youth fell under this subset and advocated for al- vocating for greater accessibility and various policy terations to the meeting structure to bring vulnerable interventions at other settings within the COPs. In populations within the process. our count, we also included Parties and delegates A second category under which youth were sub- advocating for youth-related issues. sumed associated youth with unborn generations. Youth representation in the Earth Negotiations Bul- Comprising around 19% of the selected articles, this letin ‘report of main proceedings’ varied across the categorisation almost always included the phrase examined period but generally increased, from six ‘children and grandchildren’ or ‘youth and future mentions in 2015, and only two in 2015, to fifteen in generations’. One article, written by an Indigenous 2022. Again, this uptick occurred primarily in 2019, contributor, used this language to seek temporal with a 250% increase in mentions between 2018 and continuity, writing ‘to understand who we are in 2019. In contrast to the ECO Newsletter, however, in relation to our ancestors, our grandchildren’. These which mention of youth dropped off after 2019, Earth two categories stayed stable and unchanging across Negotiations Bulletin saw sustained growth, with a the study period. 150% increase in mentions of youth from 2019 to The ECO Newsletter rarely published articles with 2021. The majority of these mentions focus exclu- an exclusive focus on youth. Of the nine articles that sively on youth as a subject in their own right, advo- did so across the eleven years, most of these pieces cating for a greater degree of inclusion in the process discussed activist activity completely outside of the or various policy changes. UNFCCC context, typically focusing on relatively Gauging from the ECO Newsletter, youth have acute forms of activism, such as Brazilian youth envi- found a position among the vulnerable populations ronmental non-governmental organisation members of climate politics, but they have also come into force suspected of arson in 2019 and the Sunrise Move- as a constituency and an actor in the international ment’s hunger strike in 2021. Although mentioned process. And as evidenced by the Earth Negotiations on occasion, this type of activism was infrequently Bulletin, youth appear more frequently in the actual profiled over the period. A moderate increase in proceedings of negotiations. Thus, these publica- frequency of this type of article correlates with the tions, external to the UNFCC and not a part of main- increased reportage of youth activist activity within stream media, would seem to indicate that youth mainstream news reportage. participate in the UNFCCC process to a greater de- While not strongly focused on youth participa- gree than ever before. tion in climate politics, the ECO Newsletter regularly invites COP attendees to write articles, particularly in one of its regular columns such as ‘Voices from Representing Themselves the Front Lines’ featured during 2018 COP24. We identified eight articles written by young people We analysed the websites of youth organisations to from 2010 to the present. Many of these articles were explore modes of organisational self-representation, written collaboratively and were attributed not to focusing on two youth group categories: first, advo- organisations but instead generalised groups such cacy-oriented groups engaged with the UNFCCC as the ‘Youth of Australia’ or ‘Young Indigenous process and, second, more informal, youth-led ac- Peoples’. These articles seem to have increased in tivist groups. We largely sourced organisations for frequency in recent years but also continue to main- the former category from the SEORS archive and tain low numbers. those in the latter from news reportage. We also We also examined the Earth Negotiations Bulletin looked at national and regional branches of organ- newsletter published by the International Institute isations, when available. To supplement this analy- for Sustainable Development. We specifically looked sis, we examined some Facebook and Twitter pages. at the ‘report of main proceedings’ for each day of Because we looked at these websites as a self-repre- the COPs. As mentioned above, these reports were sentation of activity, we looked mostly for recently significantly less polemical than the ECO Newsletter and regularly updated information in blogs, event and, instead, attempt to provide a summary of nego- calendars, records of ‘impact’ and image galleries. tiation proceedings. From the 2015 COP21 in Paris to As a result, we will not provide an assessment of the 2021 Glasgow COP26, we identified 80 passages overall website quality. documenting youth participation. These typically The websites of process-specific organisations manifested as youth representatives speaking to vary in layout and accessibility. In general, these the COP plenary or YOUNGO representatives ad- groups have not necessarily prioritised visual de- 36 |
The Problem with Children in Politics | AiA
sign: they do not use stylised logos or bright colours. greenhouse gas emissions need to peak ‘between
The homepages almost always feature a tab for their 2015 and 2017’. The website of the Qatar branch
conference delegations, a blog and a donation page. indicates that they are still active and send delega-
They frequently include pictures of youth participat- tions to the COP, but the AYCM has largely died out
ing in workshops, panels and demonstrations. without a real replacement. Though AYCM could
We began our survey of process-specific organisa- still be organising on a channel that we cannot access,
tions with the official YOUNGO website. The secu- it seems unlikely, as a recent Middle East Institute
rity certificate for the domain of this official website article writes about their dormancy, in anticipation
(youngoclimate.org) expired on 2 June, 2022 and has for COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (Shafi 2022).
not been renewed at the time of writing this paper. The general aesthetic of activist organisations,
Visitors to the site are prompted with a message that including the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebel-
‘Attackers might be trying to steal your information lion Youth and Fridays for Future, tends to rely on
from youngoclimate.org’. Visitors who try to circum- punchy, cohesive design. All three organisations
vent this message are, again, warned that the site is listed above prominently feature a stylised logo and
‘unsafe’ before being able to proceed to the website. a colour palette with one primary colour against
The blog section of the website has not been updated black and white. They focus heavily on informing
since May 2022. Although the YOUNGO website visitors of their platform and recruiting them to their
appears mostly defunct over summer 2022, the mail- movement. The visual style of these sites often priori-
ing list, which visitors can join from the website, is tises imagery of youth activists at marches or rallies.
very active. YOUNGO working groups continue to In large part, these activist organisations have sus-
meet virtually, organisations lead trainings and focal tained their activity since 2019.4 These organisations
points coordinate activity. hosted regular virtual and in-person meetings, up-
We then directed our attention to the website of dated their blogs at consistent intervals and alerted
youth-led organisation SustainUS, which has worked users of recent progress.
to mobilise youth from the United States for 20 While the documentation from UNFCCC pro-
years. They have sent regular delegations to COPs gramming and related publications would indicate
and consistently organised side events in the COP that youth involvement in the climate process sus-
space. Like many of these organisations, SustainUS tains a global high, the actual organisations demon-
prioritises informing visitors about their ‘impact’ strate a more complicated relationship to the level of
and recent programming. In early July 2022, how- participation from 2019. Many of these process-spe-
ever, the organisation released a memo looking to cific organisations continue to operate and produce
‘reawaken’ their advocacy activity after a year and a ‘impacts’ but the task of documenting this activity
half of ‘internal work, harm reduction, and reconcili- seems to be neglected within the organisations.
ation’. 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 Discussion
states that ‘2019 was our biggest year yet’, although
the blog attached to the website hasn’t been updated Scholarship on youth involvement in politics has
since 2018. tended to take two broad paths. Along the first,
We then investigated some of the organisations at scholarship has focused heavily on child soldiers,
the forefront of climate work in the early years of this their entrapment, rescue and integration into main-
centralised youth constituency. Published in 2014, At stream society (Drumbl 2012; Rosen 2007). In writing
the COP: Global Climate Justice Youth Speak Out collects War in Worcester, Reynolds attempted to break from
interviews with the leadership of some of the world’s this path or at least to nuance it further by suggest-
foremost youth-led organisations, including the Arab ing that while some children are forcibly conscripted
Youth Climate Movement (AYCM); a contempora- into violence, others step up to it as much out of a
neous article from The Guardian substantiates the commitment to political ideals, such as liberty and
standing of this organisation (Rigg 2012). The official freedom, as out of necessity. Reynolds employs ‘the
AYCM Facebook and LinkedIn pages remain intact, small scale of mini-narratives’ to better capture the
but the website linked to both pages (aycm.org) no political engagement of the men whom she inter-
longer exists. The Iraqi national branch of the AYCM views who as children hurled themselves against the
has a website that has not been updated in four years. apartheid state (2013: 19). Simultaneously, she insists
Similarly, the website of the Syrian branch states that on the importance of documentary evidence in not
| 37AiA | Naveeda Khan and Charles Nuermberger just grounding the claims of those she studied but in ing more subtly written out. The documentation capturing the voices of the many others now perma- reviewed in earlier sections of this article operates on nently left out of the records. a strict definition of the political, often isolating it to In his ‘The Childhood of Politics’, Faisal Devji specific action within the negotiation space. With the makes an overarching argument about the exclusion emergence of youth, the UNFCCC Secretariat seems of the voice of the child from politics, which is more to be making a deliberate effort to elevate youth rep- a comment on politics than a peon to children’s poli- resentation, in both the civil society space and the tics. While Devji does not concern himself with the negotiation rooms. Concurrently, climate-related me- importance of documentation as such, the readings dia sources more actively centre youth participation. he provides of Greta Thunberg’s recently published However, rather than redefining the political, the autobiography draw out the nuances of her uncon- UNFCCC seems instead to have opted for making ac- ventional political engagement, which would have cessibility and representation the lynchpin of youth been erased by an exclusive focus on Fridays for Fu- politics. In doing so, the UNFCCC indicates that it ture’s weekly strikes. In so far as he looks to literature perceives youth as a pre-political entity, a medium of and political writings to excavate the figure of the future generations, capable of little more than moral child as a political being, Devji suggests the impor- pressure. This elevation of representation, however, tance of texts as much as oral narratives in attending only partially responds to the requests of youth, and to this elusive figure within the history of politics. other vulnerable populations, for inclusion in climate Along the second path of scholarship of youth decision-making. The growth of politically active participation in politics, we have a groundswell of youth groups independent of the UNFCCC process analytical writing on youth climate activism in the could be a result of this continued perception of UNFCCC process that we have highlighted in this young people of their subtle exclusion. paper. Researchers have explored youth weaponi- In conclusion, we advocate for the capture of lost sation of ‘snark’ (Curnow 2021), maintenance of voices through the adoption of different genres (Han accountability (Kuyper and Bäckstrand 2016) and and Brandel 2019), but documentation – the act of assembly of networks (Gunningham 2019) in making inscribing – remains critical to adequately recording their presence known and impactful within climate the political subjectivity of children, rather than their policy negotiations. However, this scholarship has victimhood in face of the climate emergency. tended to treat youth activism in an entirely presen- tist manner, concerned with studying what is hap- pening now, rather than relating it to a history and Charlie Nuermberger is a second-year student in potential future of youth involvement and exclusion. Princeton, majoring in Cultural Anthropology and Furthermore, they have not taken the time to see how Environmental Studies. He carried out fieldwork youth participation registers within the public sphere and data analysis on youth participation in climate and across diverse domains, whose representations politics under the guidance of Professor Naveeda of youth politics stand to make or break it. Khan (JHU) during summer 2022. He plans to at- For our part, we have made a first pass at pars- tend the UN Intersessions in May 2023 to carry out ing out how youth appear within four sources of the research on youth presence within climate negotia- written record. It seems that the available documen- tions, which will form the core of his senior thesis. tation does not account for the complexities of how youth engage with the international climate process Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropol- and, in turn, how the process acts on youth. The cur- ogy at Johns Hopkins University. Her research spans rent state of documentation on youth engagement riverine lives and national climate policy in Bangla- in the process cannot disambiguate this increase in desh, UN-led global climate governance processes, youth representation from actual participation or and Bengali and Urdu literature. She is the author of inclusion in decision-making rooms. It cannot ac- Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan curately capture the depth of internal work, as seen (2012) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Paki- with the recent SustainUS memo, or the nuances of stan (2010). She also has also written two forthcoming youth participation. books, River Life and the Upspring of Nature and In This paper does not claim that youth have not Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the been adequately involved in the political space of Global South. climate action, but instead that youth may be be- 38 |
The Problem with Children in Politics | AiA
Notes Han, C. and A. Brandel (2019), ‘Genres of Witnessing:
Narrative, Violence, and Generations’, Ethnos
1. Faisal Devji, in the essay mentioned above, rejects Journal of Anthropology 85, no. 4: 629–646. DOI:
biological and legal definitions of childhood, favour- 10.1080/00141844.2019.1630466.
ing instead an understanding of childhood as ‘a Kuyper, J. W. and K. Bäckstrand (2016), ‘Accountability
rhetorical device to separate one world of action, re- and Representation: Nonstate Actors in UN Climate
sponsibility, or experience from another’ (2021: 222). Diplomacy’, Global Environmental Politics 16, no. 2:
2. YOUNGO website, touchstone for our analysis of 61–81. DOI: 10.1162/GLEP_a_00350.
organisational self-representation, defines youth as Margolin, J. (20 September 2019), ‘I’m Not Only
younger than 35. Striking for the Climate’, The New York Times.
3. To produce this kind of analysis, we looked at the Marsden, W. (2011), Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics
procedures outlined in ‘Website Experience Analy- of Climate Change (Toronto: Vintage Canada).
sis: A New Research Protocol for Studying Relation- Mersinoglu, Y. C. (28 August 2020), ‘Green Teen
ship Building on Corporate Websites’ by Mihaela Memes: How TikTok Could Save the Planet’, The
Vorvoreanu (2008) as well as ‘How-to-Analyze Guardian.
Webpages’ by Emilia Djonov and John Knox, in In- Milman, O. (13 April 2021), ‘“I’m Hopeful”: Jerome
teractions, Images, and Texts: A Reader in Multimodality Foster, the 18-Year-Old Helping to Craft US Climate
(2014). Policy’, The Guardian.
4. The official, international website for FFF seemed to Reynolds, P. (2013), War in Worcester (New York:
be the single exception for these activist organisa- Fordham University Press).
tions, but the social media feeds and websites for Rigg, K. (9 November 2012), ‘The Arab Youth Climate
national branches seemed very active. Movement Should Give Us Hope’, The Guardian.
Rosen, D. M. (2007), ‘Child Soldiers, International
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