Youth Climate and Environmental Mobilisation in Swedish Politics

Project Description

Recent years have seen an upsurge of climate and environmental mobilization by children and youth globally and in Sweden. Yet, while children and youth activists have become the front figures of environmental action, their participation in democratic decision-making on environmental governance is severely restricted because they are under the age of majority. Therefore, children and youth are venturing into different democratic arenas to push for more forceful climate change mitigation and protection of ecosystems. By analysing children and youth mobilization in three such arenas in Sweden—the public sphere, the courts, and the political institutions—this project seeks to examine the institutional conditions, the actions and strategies, and the effects of children and youth’s exercise of their right to democratic participation in Swedish environmental politics. Methodologically, the project combines document analysis with qualitative interviews, participant observations, and digital ethnography to explore practical and formal barriers as well as possibilities of the children and youth to take environmental action. The project contributes knowledge on the effects of youth climate mobilization: how the mobilization forms the children and youth’s understanding of democratic citizenship, how mobilization is shaped by, and shapes, the democratic arenas in which they take place as well as what impacts the mobilization has on Swedish environmental politics.