Enabling young people’s participation – an experiment in change making between scientists and citizens

The young activist Greta Thunberg’s rise to prominence, and the emerging networks of young political activists and leaders (such as Earth Guardians or YOUNGO, the Youth and Children Constituency of the UNFCCC) are powerful and promising examples of a blooming youth consciousness. Yet, contrarily, research on young people’s participation in formal political processes has described their agency and influence as marginal, at best (Percy-Smith 2015, Kallio & Häkli 2011). This begs for further scrutiny of the actual possibilities young people have to create change and form sustainable transitions.

- Most prognoses show that the global climate is already changing local conditions also in the city of Malmö, with an increased rainfall, more heatwaves, and rising sea-levels as examples. As a response, the city has initiated ambitious plans to re-shape the urban landscape. Parks and street-sides, as well as housing developments, are currently being adapted to the changing climate for the sake of the current and future inhabitants of Malmö, says Frederik Aagaard Hagemann, research assistant at SLU Alnarp.

But what do the future urban livelihoods and landscapes in a changing climate look like, if young people are asked themselves? With the exception of a few notable cases mentioned by the national- and global media, we know relatively little about this. The aim of this research in Malmö is first, to gain a deeper understanding of young people’s perspectives on climate change in their everyday-lives, and second, to build an experimental platform with the goal of increasing young people’s political agency in shaping sustainable urban futures.

- We take inspiration from successful ‘democratic experiments’ in the action research tradition to find out more of what young people actually think about the urban future in a changing climate, and what the possibilities of turning their thoughts into actions look like, says Hagemann.

In nearby Copenhagen, several action research projects are currently conducting democratic experiments, such as the involvement of a group of marginalized youth in urban renewal (Fra Viden til Velfærd: The Good Youth in Sydhavnen and Sjælør), or experimenting with urban nature-commons. What these action research projects have in common is that they work with a range of municipal and civil society actors to create free spaces for citizens to imagine, take initiative, and build sustainable urban futures. Here, the participation dynamic is reversed. Researchers and municipal actors are not engaging citizens in institutionally led projects, instead, researchers are the ones being engaged to support urban citizens and their dreams and initiatives for sustainable futures.

The pilot-project will build a collaborative platform with select municipal- and civil-society agents, visit two ongoing ‘democratic experiments’ in Copenhagen, and invite urban youth in Malmö, aged 12-17, to a mini-conference on possibilities for engagement in climate change issues and building sustainable urban futures. Alongside this, the research-team and project partners plan to develop a research-proposal for a larger-scale action research project putting the platform into practice.