Mapping the Global Youth Climate Movement: Towards a Green Economic Mandate
Report: Climate Vanguard, 03 March 2023
Executive Summary
Starting in August 2018, a global campaign of school strikes, parliamentary protests, and civic sit-ins burst into existence and re-ignited the fight for a just and habitable world. Led and organised by teenagers, school students and other young people, the youth climate movement (YCM) generated global headlines and made household names of its leaders.
Now, four years on, the global situation looks very different. COVID-19, Ukraine, and new administrations in the United States, Australia, Brazil and Germany (to name but a few) have fundamentally reshaped the social, political and economic context that young climate activists operate in. As such, the start of 2023 represents an important moment to analyse the state of the youth climate movement: its successes, failures, direction, and strategic priorities. Can the YCM recover the extraordinary momentum of its early days? Has its messaging been co-opted by those looking to protect the status quo? How has its vision evolved, and have its tactics adapted to our new post-COVID world?
This report seeks to contribute towards a better understanding of the YCM, both for those within the movement and those working in the climate and environmental policy space. Its findings are drawn from a global mapping of the contours of the YCM, created through a country-by-country digital stocktake and survey. This mapping, combined with semi-structured interviews with local and national YCM leaders from a broad swathe of countries, has built up a detailed picture of the current state of the movement.
Our key findings are as follows:
The YCM is largely united around a radical systemic analysis of the root causes of the climate crisis. Over half of the surveyed YCM groups identified a “system that puts profit over people and planet” as the root cause of climate and ecological breakdown; 89% of this group specified the system as capitalism and (neo-)colonialism. This implies a commitment to fundamental structural / systemic change over piecemeal reform.
Despite this, the YCM does not currently have a shared and coherent theory of change. There is often little analysis about what the current economic system is, how it operates, and how it reproduces itself. Consequently, a variety of visions emerge about the kind of change that YCM groups are fighting for.
Thanks in part to these inconsistencies, many groups within the YCM have not translated their structural understanding of root causes into a vision of structural, systemic change. Consequently, these groups often seek to reform the worst features of the current economic system, rather than directly uproot it.
The YCM is weakened by process defects in its shared strategic culture. Developing a theory of change is a novel rather than routine exercise for most YCM groups. This deficiency in strategic culture inhibits effective coordination and stalls progress towards material wins.
Elements of the YCM have become overly wedded to fixed strategic doctrines, for example a total commitment to the FFF model of school strikes, marches, and demanding that leaders listen to the science. This strategic inertia can lead to inflexibility and diminishing returns.
Despite this, there is an emerging radical green economic wing in the YCM. There are groups who are already full-fledged green economic change-agents with a coherent theory of change and culture of strategic fluency. The YCM as a whole shows flashes of an emerging green economic movement mandate.
The energy, creativity, and commitment of the YCM holds the power for radical transformation, but the movement needs support. The most common need is funding, whether it be operational, project-based, or core. Other needs include organisational development, networking, vision-building, and skills training.
It is hoped that these insights, as well as the global mapping, can contribute towards a strengthened and invigorated YCM, enabling greater impact, coherent decision-making, and a deeper strategic engagement with the levers of change for those young people around the world fighting for green economic transformation.