Youth’s everyday environmental citizenship: An analytical framework for studying interpretive agency

Abstract

When youth agency and climate change are understood in the context of Politics, they do not reflect young people’s everyday realities and their youthful engagement with climate change. Building on the performative understanding of citizenship, in this theoretical piece, I suggest a broader framing of youthful political agency and participation in the context of climate change and consumerism by referring to four basic lived political positionings: ‘victim’, ‘voter’, ‘rejecter’ and ‘interpreter’. I further argue that young people perform their interpretive agency by adopting everyday activism and green lifestyles while challenging adult-led conceptualisations of environmental ideologies.

Everyday youth climate politics and performances of climate citizenship in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…There are a handful of recent studies that focus on young people's independent agency (Collins, 2021), the temporal dimensions of activism (Nissen et al, 2021), and the mundanities of daily climate change activism (Navne and Skovdal, 2021). These papers demonstrate the dynamic relational characteristics of young people's everyday acts of environmental citizenship, indicating the importance of exploring youth's adoption of sustainable practices in connection to “their lived political agency” (Firinci Orman, 2022: 3). However, by and large, youth's agency regarding climate action is far too often simplistically narrated as young people “having a voice” in climate politics without detailing what this means in terms of their everyday lives.…”

“…In this article, we explore the complexities of youth perceptions of and actions to address climate change, focusing on the everyday politics and practices of climate change mitigation in NZ, a country where governments have committed to climate action, but emissions continue to rise. We adopt a relational approach to examine the contradictory standing of youth, specifically as agentic actors and environmental citizens (Firinci Orman, 2022; Isin and Nielsen, 2008), who are aware of and seek to address climate change in their daily lives (Kallio et al, 2020; Wood and Kallio, 2019). Since we are interested in exploring the informal politics of everyday life (little-p) rather than formal public politics (big-P), our research involves examining the climate actions of a small cohort of youth living in NZ's largest city of Auckland (Bowman, 2019; Iversen and Jónsdóttir, 2019).…”

Youth environmental citizenship formation: Struggled political subjectivities and everyday experiences of young people in Turkey

“…Thus, we build on the concept of lived citizenship , which has been explored by several studies (Bartos, 2012; Kallio & Mills, 2016; Lister et al, 2003; Wood, 2010), demonstrating the intersubjective, performed and spatial character of children's everyday environment (Percy‐Smith, 2015; Olsson, 2017; Baraldi & Cockburn, 2018; see also Kallio et al, 2020). Lived citizenship highlights the significance of citizenship as it is experienced and enacted in various real‐life contexts (Firinci Orman, 2022a; Kallio et al, 2020). It was theorised by Engin Isin (2008, 2009, 2019) based on his ‘acts of citizenship’ idea.…”

“…Without full citizenship entitlements and holding a marginal status in society, many young people today demand action about climate change, performing various types of environmental agency embedded in their socially, economically and ecologically complex world. This article aims to reveal how children and young people become environmentally aware citizens, not through the youth who are actively involved in climate activism in the public sphere, but by focusing on young people's everyday realities and their youthful ways of engaging with climate change‐related issues (Firinci Orman, 2022a). We report on partial data obtained from an extensive multi‐site ethnographic research project on youth environmental citizenship, drawing on young people's lived experiences in Turkey, where an authoritarian welfare regime (ruled by AKP—Turkey's Justice and Development Party) is affecting youth participation (see Walther et al, 2020) and their citizenship practices in significant ways.…”

“…Problematising early youth's lived experiences of consumption and climate change actions, we challenge the traditional environmental citizenship frameworks (e.g. consumer and green citizenship) that citizenship scholarship offers (Bellino & Adams, 2017; Hobson, 2013) by focusing on everyday environmental activism (see Firinci Orman, 2022a). Thus, we build on the concept of lived citizenship , which has been explored by several studies (Bartos, 2012; Kallio & Mills, 2016; Lister et al, 2003; Wood, 2010), demonstrating the intersubjective, performed and spatial character of children's everyday environment (Percy‐Smith, 2015; Olsson, 2017; Baraldi & Cockburn, 2018; see also Kallio et al, 2020).…”