Youth participation in the United Nations climate change negotiations: an ethnographic exploration

Young people have been participating in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conferences for over a decade, though their perspectives and participatory experiences have been largely overlooked by academics and policy-makers. This is beginning to change, catalysed by the Fridays for Future movement which has seen young people around the world take to the streets calling for rapid, ambitious climate action. Policy-makers are designing new initiatives to engage with young people, and environmental governance scholars are increasingly turning their attention to this dynamic age group. Despite this enthusiasm, the details of youth participation in global climate change governance remain largely unknown, their implications unscrutinised.

This thesis critically interrogates young people’s lived experiences of UNFCCC participation. Based on a longitudinal, ethnographic case study, it predates the Fridays for Future movement, offering key insights to guide this burgeoning research agenda. Drawing upon 32 interviews and over 900 hours of participant observation at six UNFCCC conferences between 2015 and 2018, it focuses on a UK-based youth organisation, the UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCC), which has been participating in UNFCCC conferences for several years. Through immersive engagement and trust built over time, coupled with the researcher’s long-standing interaction with the UNFCCC’s youth constituency, it sheds light on the complexities of young people’s participatory experiences whilst considering the implications for theory and practice.

Applying concepts and frameworks from a range of literatures, this thesis takes steps to bridge the interdisciplinary divide between studies of non-state actor (NSA) participation in global environmental governance and studies of youth participation, offering critical insights to both disciplines. First, testing and adapting a youth participation model, it offers a broad categorisation of the lived experiences of youth participants in this context, presenting several empirical and theoretical contributions including the identification of various purposes pursued by youth participants in the UNFCCC, multiple ways in which they are positioned and the impact of psychological factors on their participation. Second, applying key theories of justice and power, it expands and helps to mobilise justice theory beyond theoretical principles to enable a more sociological inquiry of how justice plays out in reality, finding that young people lack self and social recognition which hinders their ability to make justice claims. Third, applying the concepts of input and throughput legitimacy, it explores whether youth participation increases the democratic legitimacy of UNFCCC-orchestrated initiatives, finding that the UNFCCC offers an accessible entry point for young newcomers to climate governance, but this does not necessarily lead to increased engagement in orchestrated initiatives.

Finally, taking a step back to examine the implications of these three interlinked studies as a whole, it considers a range of normative rationales which underpin youth participation in this context. It argues that, at present, youth participation in the UNFCCC is not fully delivering against any of these rationales, offering a series of recommendations to ameliorate this. In particular, it emphasises a need for the UNFCCC Secretariat and COP Presidencies to play a more proactive role in supporting youth, along with other less powerful NSAs, to increase democratic legitimacy and establish a fairer, more inclusive global climate governance regime which works for all generations.